An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses

Corrêa, Letícia Maria Sicuro

doi:10.1007/bf02145355

Cited by 105 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Evidence from the wider act-out literature has suggested that placing the act out task in a discourse context can drastically improve act out performance (Correa, 1995;Kidd & Bavin, 2002;Weighall & Altmann, 2001;Weighall, 2003). However, this is unlikely to fully explain their observed findings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The kindergarten path effect revisited: Children’s use of context in processing structural ambiguities

Weighall

2008

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Please cite as: Weighall, A.R. (2008). The kindergarten path effect revisited:Children's use of context in processing structural ambiguities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 99 (2008) Children's use of context in processing structural ambiguities. 3 AbstractResearch with adults has shown that ambiguous spoken sentences are efficiently resolved, exploiting multiple cues -including referential context -in order to select the intended meaning (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995).Paradoxically, children appear to be insensitive to referential cues when resolving ambiguous sentences, relying instead upon statistical properties intrinsic to the language such as verb biases (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logrip, 1999). The possibility that children's insensitivity to referential context may be an artifact of the experimental design used in previous work is explored with 60 children aged 4-to 11-years-old. An act-out task was designed in order to discourage children from making incorrect pragmatic inferences, and to prevent premature and ballistic responses by enforcing delayed actions. Performance on this task was directly compared with the standard act-out task used in previous studies. The results suggest that young children (5-year-olds) do not utilize contextual information even under conditions designed to maximize their use of such cues, but that adult-like processing is evident by around the age of 8-years-old. These results support and extend previous findings by Trueswell et al., (1999) and are consistent with a constraint-based learning account of children's linguistic development.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The kindergarten path effect revisited: Children’s use of context in processing structural ambiguities

Weighall

2008

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…Furthermore, the right-branching subject-relative structure used by Hamburger and Crain (1982) was compared with its more complex centre-embedded counterpart (e.g., sentence (2) in table 1) but a processing difference was not observed. Correa (1995) designed an alternative act-out task which allowed children to process restrictive relative clauses as part of pragmatically appropriate discourse.…”

Section: The Role Of Context In Children's Relative Clause Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, studies investigating children's sensitivity to contextual information with unambiguous relative clause sentences have claimed that children are able to make use of contextual cues from as early as the age of three-or four-years old (Correa, 1995;Hamburger & Crain, 1982;Kidd & Bavin, 2002). Theories suggesting that children may adopt non-adult processing strategies when attempting to resolve relative clauses (e.g., Tavakolian, 1981;Sheldon, 1974) have been superseded by more recent work which suggests that children process relative clauses in an adult-like way, and that any observed differences can be attributed to general cognitive capacity limitations rather than linguistic differences (Correa, 1995;Kidd & Bavin, 2002;.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Theories suggesting that children may adopt non-adult processing strategies when attempting to resolve relative clauses (e.g., Tavakolian, 1981;Sheldon, 1974) have been superseded by more recent work which suggests that children process relative clauses in an adult-like way, and that any observed differences can be attributed to general cognitive capacity limitations rather than linguistic differences (Correa, 1995;Kidd & Bavin, 2002;. In support of this, Felser et al (2003) report a differential effect of memory span on the attachment preferences adopted by children for syntactically ambiguous relative clause sentences, and similar effects have been observed with adults (e.g., Swets, Desmut, Hambrick & Ferreira, 2007;Traxler, Williams, Blozis & Morris, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses

Weighall

Altmann

2010

J. Child Lang.

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An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 Englishspeaking 6-to 8-year old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativisation. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context. Pragmatically-appropriate contexts exerted a positive effect on relative clause comprehension, but children with higher memory spans demonstrated a further benefit for main clauses. Comprehension for centre-embedded main clauses was found to be very poor, independently of either context or memory span. The results suggest that children have access to adult-like linguistic processing mechanisms, and that sensitivity to extra-linguistic cues is evident in young children and develops as cognitive capacity increases.

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“…Įvairių kalbų įsisavinimo tyrimuose jau daugiau nei 40 metų didelis dėmesys skiriamas šalutinių pažyminio 1 sakinių suvokimui ir vartojimui (Sheldon 1974;De Villiers, Jill, Tager-Flusberg et al 1979;Hamburger, Crain 1982;Corrêa 1995;McKee, McDaniel, Snedeker 1998;Diessel, Tomasello 2000Eisenberg 2002;Diessel 2004;Ozeki, Shirai 2005, Utzeri 2007Brandt, Diessel, Tomasselo 2008;Doyle 2009;O'Grady, Kim, Lee et al 2011;Adani 2012;Benţea 2012). Ankstyvesniuose tyrimuose šalutinių pažyminio sakinių suvokimas ir vartojimas aiškinamas remiantis generatyvinės gramatikos principais, tačiau pastaruoju metu vis daugėja tyrimų, sudėtingą šalutinių sakinių įsisavinimo procesą siejančių su vartojimu grindžiamu modeliu (ang.…”

Section: įVadasunclassified

Relative clauses: why children have difficulties to comprehend them?

Dabašinskiené¹,

Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė²

2016

KLB

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AnotacijaStraipsnyje aprašomu tyrimu mėginama atsakyti į klausimą, ar specifinės fleksinės lietuvių kalbos ypatybės padeda vaikams lengviau suvokti sudėtingas šalutinių pažyminio sakinių konstrukcijas, išreikštas subjekto-objekto santykiais. Tyrimo metu taikant kalbos supratimo užduotį buvo testuojami 96 vaikai nuo 3 iki 12 metų. Gauti rezultatai atskleidžia, kad 3-4,5 m. amžiaus vaikams sunku suvokti skirtumą tarp šalutinių subjekto ir objekto sakinių, ypač, kai vartojamas vaikui nežinomos ar sudėtingesnės reikšmės veiksmažodis. Vėlesniame amžiuje vaikai jau suvokia skirtumą tarp subjekto ir objekto santykiais reiškiamų sakinių, tačiau priešmokykliniame amžiuje dar pasitaiko nemažai objekto sakinio interpretavimo klaidų. Tyrimas atskleidė, kad mokyklinio amžiaus vaikai jau teisingai suvokia šalutinius pažyminio sakinius ir nepainioja subjekto bei objekto reikšmės. Taigi galima teigti, kad vaikai šalutinius sakinius pradeda suprati ir vartoti tik tada, kai jų kalbos apdorojimo geba yra pakankamai patobulėjusi. Be apdorojimo procesų šalutinių sakinių įsisavinimui reikšmę turi ir vartojimu grindžiamas modelis bei dažnumo principas, semantikos ir pragmatikos veiksniai.Apibendrinant galima teigti, kad prielaida, jog turtinga fleksinė sistema palengvina sudėtingų sintaksinių santykių suvokimą, pasitvirtina tik iš dalies, nes lietuviai vaikai užtrunka įsisavinti sudėtinius pažyminio sakinius.Raktažodžiai: šalutiniai pažyminio sakiniai, subjektas, objektas, fleksinė sistema, kalbos įsisavinimas, eksperimentinis tyrimas

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An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses

Cited by 105 publications

References 16 publications

The kindergarten path effect revisited: Children’s use of context in processing structural ambiguities

The kindergarten path effect revisited: Children’s use of context in processing structural ambiguities

The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses

Relative clauses: why children have difficulties to comprehend them?

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