Abstract
In a touch-screen paradigm, we recorded 3- to 7-year-olds’ (N = 108) accuracy and response times (RTs) to assess their comprehension of 2-clause sentences containing before and after. Children were influenced by order: performance was most accurate when the presentation order of the 2 clauses matched the chronological order of events: “She drank the juice, before she walked in the park” (chronological order) versus “Before she walked in the park, she drank the juice” (reverse order). Differences in RTs for correct responses varied by sentence type: accurate responses were made more speedily for sentences that afforded an incremental processing of meaning. An independent measure of memory predicted this pattern of performance. We discuss these findings in relation to children’s knowledge of connective meaning and the processing requirements of sentences containing temporal connectives.
Highlights
Successful comprehenders form a coherent mental representation of the events described in spoken or written text (JohnsonLaird, 1983; Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)
We focus on children’s processing of sentences containing the temporal connectives before and after, which encode the relation between events on a temporal dimension (Cain & Nash, 2011; Gennari, 2004)
We report the results for accuracy and response times (RTs) separately
Summary
Successful comprehenders form a coherent mental representation of the events described in spoken or written text (JohnsonLaird, 1983; Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Reverse order sentences violate the default expectation that newly encountered information follows the most recent event in the existing representation (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) This has implications for developmental differences in the comprehension and processing of these sentences: Children are more accurate at comprehending sentences, which describe events in a chronological order compared with sentences that describe events in a reverse order (Clark, 1971). Young children may have a fragile understanding for the meaning of the connective If so, they will be more likely to use a nonlinguistic strategy to represent the sequence of events based on the assumption that language order maps onto real-world order, rather than using the linguistic information provided by the connective to guide the construction of their mental representation. The second reason is based on previous adult studies which show that, even when knowledge of temporal connectives is robust, reverse order sentences are still
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
