Six-year-old children's understanding of sentences adjoined with time adverbs (original) (raw)

On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after

1971

It was proposed that children acquire the meanings of words component by component. Forty children between 3;O and 5;O were asked to act out instructions containing the temporal conjunctions before and after (e.g., Before the boy jumped the gate, he patted the dog) and to answer questions demanding before and after in their replies. The results showed four stages in acquisition: first, children understood neither word; second, children understood before but not after; third, children interpreted after as if it meant before; and fourth, children understood both words correctly. Linguistically, the results indicated that children acquire the separate meaning-components of before and after hierarchically, from the superordinate component on down.

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)

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.

Testing theories of temporal inferences: Evidence from child language

Sentences involving past tense verbs, such as My dogs were on the carpet, tend to give rise to the inference that the corresponding present tense version, My dogs are on the carpet, is false. This inference is often referred to as a 'cessation' or 'temporal' inference, and is generally analyzed as a type of. In the literature, there are two main proposals for capturing this asymmetry: one assumes a difference in informa-tivity between the past and present counterparts mentioned above (Altshuler & Schwarzschild 2013), while the other proposes a structural difference between the two (Thomas 2012). The two approaches are similar in terms of their empirical coverage, but they differ in the predictions they make for language acquisition. We used a novel animated picture selection paradigm (building on Katsos & Bishop 2011) to investigate the predictions of the two approaches to temporal inferences, comparing the performance of a group of 4–6-year-old children and a group of adults on temporal inferences, the "not all" scalar implicature of the quantifier "some", and inferences of adverbial modifiers under negation. The results of our experiment revealed that overall, children computed all three inference types at a lower rate than the adult controls, but they were more adult-like on temporal inferences and on the inferences of adverbial modifiers than on the scalar implicature of " some ". We discuss the implications of the findings, both for a developmental alternatives-based hypothesis, which posits that children's difficulties with certain implicatures arise from a difficulty in accessing the required lexical alternatives (e.g., Barner et al. 2011; Tieu et al. 2016; 2017; Singh et al. 2016), as well as for theories of temporal inferences, arguing that the finding that children were more (and equally) adult-like on temporal inferences and adverbial modifiers supports a structural theory of temporal inferences along the lines of Thomas (2012).

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 ...

Production of temporal terms by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children

Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2011

This study investigated changes in the production of temporal terms over the preschool years. Ninetythree parents of 3-, 4-and 5-year-old children completed a questionnaire in which they indicated their child's production, and accurate use, of a list of temporal words. The results suggest that use and command emerge at different ages for different terms. Correlation and difference analyses were conducted to document the pattern of development. Words representing the present (e.g., now) and very general temporal terms (e.g., 'later') were produced and used accurately by the majority of even the youngest children. Some terms describing specific timeframes (e.g., 'yesterday') were also produced from a young age but demonstrated more gradual acquisition of appropriate use across the preschool years. Other terms appeared in children's vocabularies only later in the preschool years, and were inaccurately used even by the oldest children (e.g., 'hours'). These findings provide an initial survey of reported child competence with temporal words that has implications for research, education, and judicial contexts.