Abstract
The present study investigated 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds' (N = 91) comprehension of two‐clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after. The youngest children used an order of mention strategy to interpret the relation between clauses: They were more accurate when the presentation order matched the chronological order of events: “He ate his lunch, before he played in the garden” (chronological) versus “Before he played in the garden, he ate his lunch” (reverse). Between 4 and 6 years, performance was influenced by a combination of factors that influenced processing load: connective type and presentation order. An independent measure of working memory was predictive of performance. The study concludes that the memory demands of some sentence structures limits young children's comprehension of sentences containing temporal connectives.
Highlights
The present study investigated 3- to 7-year-olds’ (N = 91) comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after
Adult readers and listeners encode the relations between events on several dimensions, including temporality, the order in which events occur (Gennari, 2004; Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Temporal connectives such as before and after are one source of linguistic information that specifies the order of events, and as a result, they aid the comprehension of multiple-clause sentences and the construction of an accurate and coherent meaning-based representation (Costermans & Fayol, 1997)
Our findings indicate the age at which competence emerges in the use of connectives, and how this is related to different sentence structures
Summary
Adult readers and listeners encode the relations between events on several dimensions, including temporality, the order in which events occur (Gennari, 2004; Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) Temporal connectives such as before and after are one source of linguistic information that specifies the order of events, and as a result, they aid the comprehension of multiple-clause sentences and the construction of an accurate and coherent meaning-based representation (Costermans & Fayol, 1997). When children do not understand a temporal connective, they can use different strategies to understand and represent the relation between two events in a two-clause sentence containing a temporal connective, rather than using the precise linguistic information provided by the connective itself (Clark, 1971).
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