The ability of 3.5-to 5-year-old children to use phrase structure and inflectional information in form-class assignments of novel nouns and verbs was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1 performance was assessed on singular and plural nouns and on verbs with -s and -ing inflections. Accurate form-class assignments were made for all but the -ing inflection. This is attributed to a conflict between phrase structure and inflectional cues. In Experiment 2 a new sentence frame was used with verb -ing, which did not present conflicting cues. Performance was significantly better than in Experiment 1. The results are interpreted in terms of a model that proposes that phrase structure and inflectional cues to form-class are learnt independently but serve as interacting sources of information. The cues may interact in a complementary or competitive fashion. For English, the competition is resolved, in developmental terms, in favour of phrase structure cues as the more reliable source of information about form-class. This is adaptive for the grammar of English. When children hear novel or unfamiliar words they must be able to determine the referents of these words for language learning to occur successfully. One source of information which the child can use is the situation that an utterance describes. If the situation contains a novel referent and the utterance a novel word, then a reasonable assumption for the child to make would be that the novel word refers to the novel referent (Merriman 1986).
This study investigated the nature of cueing behaviours in 3‐, 6‐ and 9‐year‐old children in a spatial memory task. Although few subjects spontaneously generated the target strategy, it was found that they could be induced to do so, following prompting. The second part of the study probed children's understanding of cueing behaviour. It was found that 3‐year‐olds could be induced to produce appropriate cueing behaviours without understanding their implications. Older children, in contrast, understood the principles underlying cueing, but sometimes failed to produce cueing strategies spontaneously. The implications of these results for theories of the development of memory strategies are discussed.
This study investigated the effects of structured training at two informational levels on children's performance on a problem-solving computer program. An informed-training group (strategy training with detailed explanations) performed at a superior level to a blind-training group (strategy training with no explanations) and a control group. This superiority was maintained 3 weeks later on retest. The results are discussed in relation to the processes that mediate and facilitate training.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.