Graphs are commonly used in textbooks and educational software, and can help students understand science and social science data. However, students sometimes have difficulty comprehending information depicted in graphs. What makes a graph better or worse at communicating relevant quantitative information? How can students learn to interpret graphs more effectively? This article reviews the cognitive literature on how viewers comprehend graphs and the factors that influence viewers' interpretations. Three major factors are considered: the visual characteristics of a graph (e.g., format, animation, color, use of legend, size, etc.), a viewer's knowledge about graphs, and a viewer's knowledge and expectations about the content of the data in a graph. This article provides a set of guidelines for the presentation of graphs to students and considers the implications of graph comprehension research for the teaching of graphical literacy skills. Finally, this article discusses unresolved questions and directions for future research relevant to data presentation and the teaching of graphical literacy skills.
Elicited imitation was used to determine whether young children's inconsistent production of sentence subjects was due to limitations in their knowledge of English or in their ability to access and use that knowledge. Nineteen young children (age range = 1 year 10 months to 2 years 8 months; Mean Length of Utterance [MLU] range = 1.28 to 4.93) repeated sentences that varied in length, structure, and type of subject. A competence-deficit hypothesis would predict that children below MLU 3 would differentially omit expletive subjects and subjects preceded by a discourse topic more often than children above MLU 3. That hypothesis was discontinued. A performance-deficit hypothesis would predict that children below MLU 3 would omit more subjects from long sentences than short ones, and that the high-MLU children would not show a length effect. That hypothesis was confirmed. Processing limitations, rather than a defective grammar, explain very young children's absent subjects.
Jaeger, Lockwood, Kemmerer, Van Valin, Murphy, and Khalak 1996 ( Language 72.3) reported an experimental study that provided reaction time and PET neuroimaging data said to support Pinker's (1991) theory of inflectional morphology in which rule-governed forms and exceptions are processed by separate mechanisms. The results were also taken as evidence against connectionist accounts in which a single processing system generates both types of forms. We provide a critical analysis of the study that yields three main conclusions: First, Jaeger et al.'s data do not provide strong evidence that rule-governed forms and exceptions are processed in separate brain regions. Second, there are problems with the design of the study that contaminate critical comparisons between conditions. The results therefore afford alternative interpretations related to experiment-specific factors rather than the regular-irregular distinction. Third, the dissociations between rule-governed forms and exceptions observed in studies such as Jaeger et al.'s can be accommodated by the connectionist theory. We conclude by offering suggestions for future research that would overcome the major limitations of this study and provide more decisive evidence bearing on the issues.
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