Does past tense marking indicate the acquisition of the concept of temporal displacement in children's cognitive development?

Abstract

The acquisition of past tense markers has often been considered to parallel conceptual development in the domain of time (e.g., Weist, 1986). However, the precise relationship between linguistic marking of time in children's speech and conceptual development has not been investigated in data-based research. This study analyses longitudinal speech data from four Japanese children to determine whether the use of the past tense form actually coincides with its use to signal past time. The results show that the relationship between contrastive use of the form and truly deictic past is not a straightforward one; for all the children, deictic use emerges later than the contrastive use of past and nonpast forms.

The Development of Temporal Concepts: Learning to Locate Events in Time

“…It should be noted, though, that toward the end of this period some children begin to use the past tense for the first time (for examples, see Shirai & Andersen, 1995;Shirai & Miyata, 2006;Weist, 1989). The issue then, is how we should interpret early use of the past tense, and whether this early use suggests that very young children do not have the conceptual limitations that we are proposing here.…”

“…Historically, this has been a highly controversial issue (Antinucci & Miller, 1976;Bronckart & Sinclair, 1973;Weist, 1989Weist, , 2014, and it is beyond the scope of this paper to summarize the developmental psycholinguistics debate. Detailed analyses suggest that children's first uses of the past tense (Sachs, 1983;Shirai & Miyata, 2006) are to the immediate rather than the remote past, consistent with the idea that very young children's first use of the past tense is to mark something about the nature of the events themselves (i.e., that they are completed).2 In suggesting this, we are not claiming that these very young children cannot represent anything except the here-and-now. We are assuming that young children have the sort of representational capacities widely attributed to them in the post-Piagetian era of cognitive developmental psychology, as demonstrated, e.g., by studies of deferred imitation of event sequences (Bauer & Wewerka, 1995;Bauer et al, 1994;Meltzoff, 1995) or by the fact that children of this age will refer to absent objects or people (Sachs, 1983).…”

Verbal aspect in Serbian children’s language production

“…In our opinion, an important contribution to a more complete picture on acquisition of aspect comes from research within the functionalist approach (Li, 1990;Li & Bowerman, 1998;Li & Shirai, 2000;Shirai & Miyata, 2006;Stoll, 1998Stoll, , 2001Stoll, , 2005. They identified two relevant factors that influence acquisition: the language input that a child is exposed to, and pragmatic factors, i.e.…”

Temporal Decentering and the Development of Temporal Concepts

“…Although it is not clear that the linguistic evidence supports strong versions of this claim, our understanding of the more recent literature is that children do find it easier to understand some types of tensed verbs (i.e., those describing certain sorts of events) than others; as Wagner (2001) put it, there are aspectual influences on tense comprehension. Furthermore, there is some evidence that the earliest uses of past tense forms are more likely to occur in certain event contexts and for certain types of verbs than others (Shirai & Miyata, 2006). In other words, the basic intuition behind the aspect‐before‐tense hypothesis—that children's understanding of time is closely tied to their representations of events—may be correct, even if a strong version of the hypothesis is not.…”