On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after (original) (raw)

Comprehension of before and after in logical and arbitrary sequences

Journal of Child Language, 1977

Preschool children were required to act out a series of two-event sequences conjoined by either before or after. The sentences to be acted out consisted of either a meaningfully or an arbitrarily ordered sequence of events. Performance was markedly superior for meaningfully ordered sequences. It is suggested that the meanings of before and after must be acquired in situations which provide contextual support, and only then can be applied in situations which do not provide such support.

Comprehension of Temporal Sentences by Japanese Children

1987

A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy. Some children were provided with a choice of toy for the task (context) and others were not (no context). Results indicate that by five years, Japanese children know the meaning of temporal terms, a finding similar to that for English-speaking children. The results on contextual support suggest that contextual information was helpful in a methodological way, when the order of suggestion of the tasks matched the order of their supposed performance. This finding favors a processing rather than syntactic or semantic account of children's performance failures. (MBE)

3 The acquisition of temporality

Three reasons render the expression of temporality a particularly in-teresting issue in language acquisition research. Firstly, temporality is a fundamental category of human experience and cognition, and all human languages have developed a wide range of devices to express it. These devices are similar, but not identical, across languages, and this well-defined, or at least well-definable, variability presents the learner with a clear set of acquisitional problems, and allows the re-searcher to study in which order, and in which way, these problems are approached. Secondly, the expression of temporality in a par-ticular language typically involves the interplay of several means -lexical (eg., inherent verb meaning), morphological (e.g., tense mark-ing), syntactic (e.g., position of temporal adverbs), pragmatic (e.g., rules of discourse organisation). This allows the researcher to study how an interacting system, rather than some isolated phenomenon, is acquired. Thirdly, one major ...

Six-year-old children's understanding of sentences adjoined with time adverbs

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1973

The adjoining of clauses with temporal links is the basis for many sentences that convey sequence of events. The present study attempts to delineate 6-year-old children's (N=30) understanding of the meaning sequences imparted by sentences adjoined with “after”, “before”, and “until”. Their performance of the meaning sequence for each of 24 carefully constructed sentences is compared to an adult model. Analysis of the results (using a Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Signed Rank Test) indicated that: (1)Ss understood sentences adjoined with “after” according to an adult model more frequently than “before” adjoined sentences (P<0.01); (b) “Until” adjoined sentences with a negative marker in the main clause were understood according to an adult model more often than “until” adjoined sentences with no such negative element, but the difference was not significant at a=0.01; (3)Ss understood “before” adjoined sentences according to an adult model more often than “until” adjoined sentences, but the difference was not significant at a=0.01. In general, the results indicated that 6-year-olds have not yet completed development of an “adult grammar” with respect to adjoining clauses with temporal links, “after”, “before”, and “until”.