Children's Interpretation Research Articles

Bigger versus smaller: Children's understanding of size comparison words becomes more precise with age.

The ability to compare plays a key role in how humans learn, but words that describe relations between objects, like comparisons, are difficult to learn. We examined how children learn size comparison words, and how their interpretations of these change across development. One-hundred-and-forty children in England (36-107 months; 68 girls; majority White) were asked to build block structures that were bigger, longer, smaller, shorter, or taller than an experimenter's. Children were most successful with words that refer to size increases. Younger children were less accurate with smaller and shorter, often building bigger structures. The dimensional aspect of taller emerged gradually. These findings suggest that children's interpretation of the meaning of size comparison words changes and becomes more precise across development.

Being family via WeChat: Children's interpretation of long‐distance family relationships

AbstractThis study explores how left‐behind children in rural China maintain long‐distance family relationships through WeChat, highlighting the significant role of social media during family separation. It underscores the importance of considering children's voices in understanding family relationships in the digital age. Drawing on online workshops and interviews with 41 participants, the research examines how Chinese left‐behind children use WeChat to facilitate parental engagement and manage their emotions. It also investigates the challenges children face in online communication and their perspectives on grandparental involvement. This article argues that children's agency is situated within structural conditions shaped by a confluence of factors, including technological affordances, unique familial contexts, and socio‐economic inequalities. This situatedness fosters creativity, compromises, and adaptations in ‘being family’ at a distance.

Effects of group entitativity on young English-speaking children's interpretation of inclusive We.

The pronoun we can be used to refer to various collections of people depending on various pragmatic factors. This article reports the results of two online experiments that investigated children's interpretation of inclusive we, in which the child-listener is part of the intended referent of we. 128 2- and 4-year-olds collaborated with three partners in a coloring task. Before they played together, one partner informed participants that, e.g., "we can color!" Participants had their own markers and had to choose to how many partners to distribute (virtual) markers. In the first experiment, the partners appeared more like an aggregation of individuals than a collaborative group. The second experiment flipped this so that the partners appeared more like a collaborative group. Contrary to expectations, there was relatively little evidence for development in children's interpretation of we. Additionally, participants did not sharply distinguish their interpretations of we from those of we both or we all. Rather, participants were more likely to choose group interpretations when contextual cues indicated that their partners were a collaborative group than an aggregation of individuals. Interestingly, this interpretational distinction was sharpest for the pragmatically ambiguous we, compared to the relatively unambiguous we both and we all. These results are informative about the kinds of cues that shape young children's interpretation of pragmatically ambiguous pronominal reference.

Children's Interpretations of Numerically Quantified Expression Ambiguities: Evidence from Quantified Noun Phrases and Bare Cardinals.

Understanding how children comprehend text by forming links between sentences has been the focus of research for decades. Such research has consistently shown that children use anaphors and resolve ambiguities in a different manner than adults. The present study examined a less-studied anaphoric reference that arises when two numerically quantified expressions (e.g., "three cats… two cats…") are used in the text. Focusing on 249 six- to eight-year-old children and 50 adults for comparison, the study employed a picture selection task across six experiments to assess interpretative preferences in ambiguous and unambiguous discourses containing numerically quantified expressions. The findings indicate a pronounced difference in interpretative strategies: unlike adults, who predominantly adopted an anaphoric subset reading, children showed a consistent preference for the non-anaphoric reading, even in contexts explicitly disambiguated towards this interpretation. This preference persisted across various experimental manipulations, highlighting challenges in text integration and comprehension among children. Contributing to the developmental trajectory of language comprehension, this study underscores the complexity of cognitive development and linguistic interpretation, revealing significant developmental differences in processing numerically quantified expressions and anaphoric references within discourse.

Parental Awareness of Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood Development

The study aimed to address the gaps in understanding the significant impact of parental supervision and discourse on children's interpretation of gender norms in society. To achieve this, a comprehensive methodology was employed, involving an in-depth analysis of parental views, language use, toy and clothing choices, and activities. The findings of the study highlighted the crucial role of parental influence in either reinforcing or challenging established gender norms, thus impacting children's choices and self-expression. This research sheds light on the importance of parental involvement in cultivating a more inclusive and diverse understanding of gender for the next generation. Furthermore, the article delved into the complex ways in which parents shape their children's conceptions of gender in the early years of their lives. The study underscored the significance of parental supervision and emphasized how parental attitudes are transmitted to children, influencing their perspectives and actions with respect to gender stereotypes. Additionally, the research explored several facets of parental discourse, clarifying the ways in which language and conversations within the home have significant effects on children's understanding of societal gender norms.

Mothers' negative focus during memory‐sharing conversations is linked to negative interpretation and memory biases in young children

AbstractParent‐guided reminiscing helps children learn how to interpret and recollect personal experiences. These interpretive abilities are important because many experiences are ambiguous, and a tendency toward negative interpretation is associated with emotional disorders. Here, we explore whether naturally‐occurring variations in parent‐guided reminiscing are associated with children's interpretation and recall of novel ambiguous events. Mothers and their children (aged 5–6 years) reminisced about three shared negative events. Next, children were read several stories that described ambiguous social situations and were asked to invent endings that involved making an inference about motives of others in the stories. Later, children were asked questions to elicit story recall. Mothers who used more negative terms during reminiscing had children who were more likely to invent negative story endings and distort story recall negatively. Thus, mothers who frame memory‐sharing conversations with children negatively might put them at risk for developing negative interpretation and memory biases.

"Mom Said after the Spring Festival, I've Grown a Year": Chinese Preschoolers' Perspectives on Growing Up.

Previous studies on child development have emphasized universal developmental stages and socialization, overlooking a direct investigation of young children's subjective understanding of growing up. This study explored the perspectives of preschool children on growing up. Participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and drawing-telling were employed to investigate 56 urban Chinese preschoolers. The theoretical framework adopted for this study was Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology, providing a lens through which the children's voices were elucidated. The results revealed that children perceive their growth holistically across four themes: body, space, skills, and relations. Their perception of growing up adheres to a structure-agency duality, where social influences and children's agency coalesce to shape their understanding of growing up. Adults contribute by embedding significance in daily situations and designated "occupations", while children actively reinterpret these societal narratives, forging their conceptions of growing up. These findings suggest a need for educational approaches that resonate with children's interpretations of their evolving lifeworld beyond merely imparting knowledge.

Developmental change in English-learning children's interpretations of salient pitch contours in word learning.

To efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English should avoid interpreting pitch-contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the relevance of pitch at other levels of structure. Thus far, the developmental time-course with which English-learning children rule out pitch as a contrastive feature has been incompletely characterized. Prior studies have tested diverse lexical contrasts and have not tested beyond 30months. To specify the developmental trajectory over a broader age range, we extended a prior study (Quam & Swingley, 2010), in which 30-month-olds and adults disregarded pitch changes, but attended to vowel changes, in newly learned words. Using the same phonological contrasts, we tested 3- to 5-year-olds, 24-month-olds, and 18-month-olds. The older two groups were tested using the language-guided-looking method. The oldest group attended to vowels but not pitch. Surprisingly, 24-month-olds ignored not just pitch but sometimes vowels as well-conflicting with prior findings of phonological constraint at 24months. The youngest group was tested using the Switch habituation method, half with additional phonetic variability in training. Eighteen-month-olds learned both pitch-contrasted and vowel-contrasted words, whether or not additional variability was present. Thus, native-language phonological constraint was not evidenced prior to 30months (Quam & Swingley, 2010). We contextualize our findings within other recent work in this area.

Students’ Speaking Ability in Interpreting Something (a case study of using Indonesian Language

This study intends to convey the ability to interpret and speak especially early childhood in certain areas in Palopo using qualitative research. The instrument in this study was a standard Indonesian speaking test by interview directly. The results found were quite surprising because not all children were able to speak in a standard manner, some of them were influenced by local language even though the messages they conveyed were understood by the researcher well, but it was undeniable that some were also difficult to understand. This study also illustrates that the relationship between children's interpretation ability and speaking ability is related to one another, but in this case the researcher does not see one side only in the sense that it includes the strengths and weaknesses of each child.

Thought and language: Effects of group-mindedness on young children's interpretation of exclusive we.

The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a speaker puppet responded, "We did!" In one condition, the speaker was near one and distant from another puppet, implying a dyadic interpretation of we. In another condition, the speaker was distant from both, thus pulling for a group interpretation. In the former condition, 2- and 4-year-olds favored the dyadic interpretation. In the latter condition, only 4-year-olds favored the group interpretation. Age-related conceptual development "expands" the set of conceivable plural person referents.

Children's interpretations of parental responses to children's negative emotions in Chinese urban and rural communities

AbstractChildren's interpretations of parenting behaviors offer valuable insights into cultural meanings of parenting. This study examined how Chinese urban and rural children interpreted six different types of parental responses to children's negative emotions (PRCNE), which have traditionally been identified as supportive (e.g., emotion‐focused responses, problem‐focused responses, and expressive encouragement) versus nonsupportive ones (e.g., minimization, parental distress, punitive responses) in Western cultures. Based on surveyed samples of 976 children, demographically matched samples of 102 urban (Mage = 14.23 years) and 100 rural (Mage = 14.38 years) children were generated for analysis, using propensity score matching (PSM). Results revealed that compared with rural children, urban children rated problem‐focused responses as more normative, whereas parental distress and punitive responses as less normative. Additionally, urban children evaluated emotion‐focused responses, problem‐focused responses, expressive encouragement, and minimization as less negative, and parental distress as less positive than rural children. In urban communities, emotion‐focused responses, problem‐focused responses, and encouragement were evaluated most positively and least negatively, followed by minimization, and lastly parental distress and punitive responses. In rural communities, emotion‐focused responses and problem‐focused responses were evaluated most positively and least negatively, followed by encouragement and minimization, and lastly parental distress and punitive responses. The findings highlight the diverse interpretations children have towards PRCNE across different cultural contexts.

An Analysis of the Role of African Values, Traditions and Morals in the Interpretation of Children's Rights

Both the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) expressly provide for African values, traditions and morals. This inclusion is a unique characteristic that illustrates the regionality of these two instruments. The question of how "African values" should be understood and interpreted, however, remains somewhat unclear with the possibility of challenges arising in its interpretation and application. The article considers how African values are incorporated into the ACHPR and the ACRWC to provide an understanding of African values. The article subsequently engages in an analysis of the significance of the incorporation of African values for the interpretation of children's rights by considering both criticism and praise which have been levelled against the inclusion of African values in the ACRWC and ACHPR. This analysis will ultimately aid in determining the contribution of African values to the interpretation and possible realisation of children's rights.

Buya Hamka's Emancipatory Interpretation in Children's Education

This paper aims to analyze and understand Buya Hamka's emancipatory interpretation of reasoning in children's education. This is because education is a place to accommodate skills and provide freedom for students; education is an effort to educate the nation's life. The researcher uses a qualitative approach to the type of library research. The results of this study indicate that the Koran is able to adapt subtly to the conditions of education in this era. Emancipatory interpretation can help humans in diagnosing and understanding the social problems of humanity faced by humanity. Emancipatory interpretation can be seen as a tool to sharpen conscience awareness in seeing, perceiving, and at the same time solving humanity's social problems.

В поисках субъекта учебной деятельности

<p>Our research on the interpsychological interaction of teachers and first graders was carried out by microanalysis of two cases when the identical learning tasks were set. This method of clinical research makes it possible to expose the theoretical dimensions of an interpsychological action when (1) both a child and adult solve a new task for the first time, acting on their own accord and on their own initiatives and designs, (2) the nonadditive effect of interpsychologial action can be achieved when the initiatives of all participants intersect and their designs are coordinated. By reconstructing the teacher's intentions and children's interpretations of the task proposed by the teacher, working in the activity-based or traditional paradigm, we identified productive and counterproductive adult actions that can open or block opportunities for children's proactive behavior in constructing new concepts and reduce or enhance the potential of executive, nonreasoning behavior. The birth of children's initiatives when setting a learning task, when elucidated at the level of functional genesis, is seen in ontogenesis as the development of the ability to learn, that is considered as the top manifestation of the subject of learning activity, capable of independently going beyond his or her own knowledge and skills to find new ways of action in novel situations.</p>

Learning the rules of the game: The role of generic "you" and "we" in shaping children's interpretations of norms.

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns "you" and "we," which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to 9-year-old primarily living in the midwestern U.S. (N=146, 75 girls, 71 boys, Mage =7.14, SD=1.69, 82% White) interpreted actions described with generic pronouns (vs. "I") as normatively correct and selected the speaker who used generic pronouns as the rule-follower, particularly when generic pronouns were presented first. There were no significant effects of age. These results illustrate how generic pronouns influence how children discern unfamiliar norms and form interpersonal judgments.

Children's understanding of most is dependent on context

Children struggle with the quantifier “most”. Often, this difficulty is attributed to an inability to interpret most proportionally, with children instead relying on absolute quantity comparisons. However, recent research in proportional reasoning more generally has provided new insight into children's apparent difficulties, revealing that their overreliance on absolute amount is unique to contexts in which the absolute amount can be counted and interferes with proportional information. Across two experiments, we test whether 4- to 6-year-old children's interpretation of most is similarly dependent on the discreteness of the stimuli when comparing two different quantities (e.g., who ate most of their chocolate?) and when verifying whether a single amount can be described with the term most (e.g., is most of the butterfly colored in?). We find that children's interpretation of most does depend on the stimulus format. When choosing between absolutely more vs. proportionally more as depicting most, children showed stronger absolute-based errors with discrete stimuli than continuous stimuli, and by 6-years-old were able to reason proportionally with continuous stimuli, despite still demonstrating strong absolute interference with discrete stimuli. In contrast, children's yes/no judgements of single amounts, where conflicting absolute information is not a factor, showed a weaker understanding of most for continuous stimuli than for discrete stimuli. Together, these results suggest that children's difficulty with most is more nuanced than previously understood: it depends on the format and availability of proportional vs. absolute amounts and develops substantially from 4- to 6-years-old.

Drawing Talking: Listening to Children With Speech Sound Disorders.

Listening to children using age-appropriate techniques supports evidence-based clinical decision-making. In this article, we test the Sound Effects Study Drawing Protocol, an arts-based technique, to support children with speech sound disorder (SSD) to express their views about talking. Participants were 124 Australian children aged 4-5 years in the Sound Effects Study. Their parents and teachers were concerned about their talking, and they were assessed as having SSD on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology. Drawings and children's interpretations were elicited then analyzed using the (a) Who Am I? Draw-a-Person Scale and (b) Sound Effects Study Focal Points. Drawings were developmentally typical for 4- to 5-year-olds. The six Sound Effects Study Focal Points were identified across the 124 drawings: body parts and facial expressions, talking and listening, relationships and connection, positivity, negativity, and no talking. Participants portrayed talking and listening as an action requiring mouths and ears represented by symbols (letters, speech bubbles) or as an activity with a variety of people. Children typically portrayed themselves as happy when talking; however, some portrayed negativity and some chose not to draw talking. In keeping with Articles 12 and 13 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this research demonstrated that 4- to 5-year-old children with SSD can express their views about talking via drawing. Professionals may use the Sound Effects Study Drawing Protocol as a child-friendly technique to support children to express views to guide holistic, evidence-based, child-centered speech-language pathology practice.

This Essay is a Manipulation of Matter

This Essay is a Manipulation of Matter Jax Connelly (bio) POINT OF ORIGIN: The fuck yous are booming through my sun-dappled neighborhood, threatening to shake branches from trees. The man is doubling over with rage, halting every few feet to bend his imposing body in two, hold his phone in front of his face and fuck you into it as if it has taken something from him he'll never be able to recover. It was a compliment, he's bellowing, over and over, so many times the words become a bassline: dada-da-DA-da-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da. It was a compliment it was a compliment it was a compliment fuck you fuck you you fucking bitch. COMPONENT: Seated on a block of cement, she is exactly as tall as I am. Her thighs are pressed together, legs stiff, knees bent at ninety degrees, toes pointed toward the floor. Her lap, wooden and flat and skeleton-narrow—uninviting. She sports a bland checkered coat, black squares alternating with grey, some tan, some brown. She leans backward, away from herself, arching her back like bark splayed out from a droughtracked tree, and where her sternum should be, an explosion: strips fanning out from her chest like a child's interpretation of a lion's mane, or Medusa's snakes scared still and straight, or the flames of a paper sun. Margaret Wharton's sculpture Leopatra is not a crime scene, just dissonance—what the body remembers and what it presents, contradictions occupying the same space because they have nowhere else to go. Half neatly composed—the dainty feet, the polite posture—but before the gaze even reaches her neck, she's come undone. She's lost her head and she's lost her hands, so here is her heart, revealing all the things she can no longer speak, or hold. COMPONENT: I once watched a woman's head explode. In the arthouse sci-fi film High Life, a shuttle's trajectory is altered by a molecular cloud and subsequently dives into a black hole. The pilot, Boyse, dies by spaghettification—the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long, thin shapes in a non-homogeneous gravitational field. This does not happen in an instant. The scene is impossibly slow, Boyse's face beginning to crumple almost imperceptibly, her brain unspooling like it's reluctant to let go. Earlier, Boyse is violently raped. As part of a crew of death-row inmates sent on a mission to extract energy from the black hole, she sleeps with her limbs strapped to her bedframe. She wakes up and it's already happening, she wakes up and understands immediately, in that waterline strip between unconsciousness and consciousness, that there's nothing she can do to stop it. Google tells me spaghettification is "caused by extreme tidal forces." According to some dude on a Quora forum, the process isn't painful: "The black hole will pull you so fast that electrons transmitting [End Page 115] the pain signals will not be strong enough to escape the gravitational pull in order to make it to the brain." POINT OF ORIGIN: My dog and I are close enough, now, to observe how the wrath has colored the man's face slap-red, how it's screwed his features in tight like they're bolted to a table. Carefully, I avert my eyes. I hold my breath. I move my limbs stiffly, quietly, I don't want him to notice me, but I can't help flinching as he passes by, not noticing me at all: da-da-da-DA-da-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da da-dada-DA-da-da fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. COMPONENT: In her novel Milkman, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2018, Anna Burns explores the consequences of a disconnect between language and experience—what happens when we don't have words to describe and transcend trauma. It's Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and the nameless narrator, middle sister, is stalked by a paramilitary known only as the milkman. He doesn't explicitly threaten violence but shows up unannounced and uninvited when she's alone and...

Children's reception of critical concepts in animated movies

The purpose of this study is to reveal how children interpret animated movies that include critical concepts. The study investigates the mechanism of 20 Iranian children's interpretation aged 9–12 of animations that contain critical concepts and challenging ideas. Participants were interviewed by an ethnographic approach immediately after watching three animated movies, Zootopia, Kung Fu Panda 3, and Inside Out. The collected data were interpreted based on reception theory, sociocultural theory, and frame theory. Three categorizations emerged from the data collected from interviews with children: framegroup, different framegroup, and incomplete framegroup. The variables most influencing children's interpretation of animations were their schemas or frames and the conceptual tools to interpret the animated movies. Some of the results show that the selected animations were not influential enough to change children's schemas and improve their critical thinking. However, if they were equipped with critical conceptual tools, they would grasp and interpret critical concepts featured in the animations.

The Inter-Rater Reliability of Pediatric Point-of-Care Lung Ultrasound Interpretation in Children With Acute Respiratory Failure.

Use of point-of-care lung ultrasound (POC-LUS) has increased significantly in pediatrics yet it remains under-studied in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). No studies explicitly evaluate the reliability of POC-LUS artifact interpretation among critically ill children with acute respiratory failure (ARF) in the PICU. We thus designed this study to determine the inter-rater reliability of POC-LUS interpretation in pediatric ARF among pediatric intensivists trained in POC-LUS and an expert intensivist. We compared the interpretation of lung sliding, pleural line characteristics, ultrasound artifacts, and POC-LUS diagnoses among pediatric intensivists and an expert intensivist in a cohort of children admitted to the PICU for ARF. Kappa statistics (k) adjusted for maximum attainable agreement (k/kmax ) were used to quantify chance-correct agreement between the pediatric intensivist and expert physician. We enrolled 88 patients, evaluating 3 zones per hemithorax (anterior, lateral, and posterior) for lung sliding, pleural line characteristics, ultrasound artifacts, and diagnosis. There was moderate agreement between the PICU intensivist and expert-derived diagnoses with 56% observed agreement (k/kmax = 0.46, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.31-0.65). Agreement in identification of lung sliding (k= 0.19, 95% CI -0.17 to 0.56) and pleural line characteristics (k= 0.24, 95% CI 0.08-0.40) was slight and fair, respectively, while agreement in the interpretation of ultrasound artifacts ranged from moderate to substantial. Evidence supporting the evaluation of neonatal and adult patients with POC-LUS should not be extrapolated to critically ill pediatric patients. This study adds to the evidence supporting use of POC-LUS in the PICU by demonstrating moderate agreement between PICU intensivist and expert-derived POC-LUS diagnoses.