The Role of Syntax in Children's Comprehension from Ages Six to Twelve

Kessel, Frank S.

doi:10.2307/1165662

Cited by 57 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Children acquire the ability to perform such tasks as interpreting ambiguity at different rates (Kessel, 1970). Differences have also been found in terms of adult performance.…”

Section: Learners' Language Analytic Abilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the Interface between Metalinguistic Task Performance and Oral Production in a Second Language

White¹,

Ranta²

2002

Language Awareness

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Children acquire the ability to perform such tasks as interpreting ambiguity at different rates (Kessel, 1970). Differences have also been found in terms of adult performance.…”

Section: Learners' Language Analytic Abilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the Interface between Metalinguistic Task Performance and Oral Production in a Second Language

White¹,

Ranta²

2002

Language Awareness

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…or lexical ambiguity (e.g., did the speaker use “tank” to refer to an army tank or a gas tank?) (Kessel, 1970; Shultz & Pilon, 1973). …”

Section: Referential Ambiguity When Children Give “Yes” or “No” Respomentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatic failure and referential ambiguity when attorneys ask child witnesses “do you know/remember” questions.

Evans¹,

Stolzenberg²,

Lyon³

2017

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“Do you know” and “Do you remember” (DYK/R) questions explicitly ask whether one knows or remembers some information while implicitly asking for that information. This study examined how 104 4- to 9-year-old children testifying in child sexual abuse cases responded to DYK/R wh- and yes/no questions. When asked DYK/R questions containing an implicit wh- question requesting information, children often provided unelaborated “Yes” responses. Attorneys’ follow-up questions suggested that children usually misunderstood the pragmatics of the questions. When DYK/R questions contained an implicit yes/no question, unelaborated “Yes” or “No” responses could be responding to the explicit or the implicit questions resulting in referentially ambiguous responses. Children often provided referentially ambiguous responses and attorneys usually failed to disambiguate children’s answers. Although pragmatic failure following DYK/R wh- questions decreased with age, the likelihood of referential ambiguity following DYK/R yes/no questions did not. The results highlight the risks of serious miscommunications caused by pragmatic misunderstanding and referential ambiguity when children testify.

show abstract

“…In adopting a less global approach than that of Vogel, the present research has been able to define an area of deficit sufficiently clearly to warrant the construction of a specialised remedial programme. In extending the debate on the relationship between reading retardation and syntactic abilities to relations across clause boundaries it also has been useful for establishing the relevance of measures derived from generative grammar which have been used in other facets of developmental research, e.g., Chomsky (1969), Cromer (1970) and Kessell (1970), but have remained largely neglected by those investigating reading retardation.…”

Section: A G E Diferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interpretation of Pronominal Reference by Retarded and Normal Readers

Dalgleish

Enkelmann

1979

Brit J of Edu Psychol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Summary. Retarded and normal readers were required to interpret two clause sentences in which the pronominal subject of one clause agreed with the named subject of the other. If the pronominal subject appears in the main clause, the subjects cannot have the same identity. If it is in the subordinate clause, the subjects may have the same or different identities. Some sentences followed an indirect speech format in which the subordinate clause is usually preceded by the main; others contained subordinate clauses headed by an adverb, which are not fixed in relation to the main clause. A simple order based solution sometimes adopted by young children avoids the main and subordinate distinction: if the pronominal subject precedes the named subject its reference is restricted to a different identity (ID2). The retarded subjects produced significantly fewer ID2 interpretations when these were obligatory, confirming that syntactic problems may be implicated in reading retardation. The group × set interaction was not significant, although the normal readers were too advanced to apply the order strategy. Since the retarded readers did not spontaneously apply the order strategy the possibility of teaching it where the main: subordinate distinction is too difficult to operationalise is raised.

show abstract

The Role of Syntax in Children's Comprehension from Ages Six to Twelve

Cited by 57 publications

References 8 publications

Examining the Interface between Metalinguistic Task Performance and Oral Production in a Second Language

Examining the Interface between Metalinguistic Task Performance and Oral Production in a Second Language

Pragmatic failure and referential ambiguity when attorneys ask child witnesses “do you know/remember” questions.

The Interpretation of Pronominal Reference by Retarded and Normal Readers

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About