Full Mastery Research Articles

Nonverbal Assessment of Conservation of Number

MILLER, SCOTT A. Noncerbal Assessment of Conservation of Number. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 722-728. 3 experiments examined kindergartners' ability to conserve number in response to different forms of questioning. 3 experimental conditions were compared: nonverbal, in which subjects selected 1 of 2 rows of candy to keep; standard, in which subjects answered the typical same versus more question; and control, in which subjects selected 1 of 2 rows of candy, but without the pretransformation information on which a conservation judgment could be based. Correct answers were more frequent in the nonverbal condition than in the standard condition, but the difference between the conditions was small. The slight superiority of performance in the nonverbal condition resulted from the fact that children were less often consistently wrong on the nonverbal trials; there was no indication that a full mastery of conservation could be elicited earlier by the nonverbal procedure. Finally, interpretation of performance in the nonverbal condition must be further qualified by the fact that control subjects performed as well as nonverbal subjects.

The Two-Year-Old Stage in the Acquisition of English Phonology

It is a widely held view among linguists and psycholinguists that the phonology of a child's speech at any stage during the acquisition process is structured (cf. Jakobson 1941). Such structure, however, has not been well documented in the past. This paper is an attempt to find and present the phonological structure of three children at age two. One possible approach, used in ?1 below, is an analysis of substitutions, or sets of correspondences between the child's renditions and the utterances of the adult model. Such an approach reveals much information about phonetic structure, distribution, and particular problems which the child is encountering and overcoming at the moment. Another approach, used in ?2 below, is a phonological analysis, potentially more revealing of structure, but encompassing many more theoretical problems. To be most useful, the resultant phonology should fit into a series of phonologies, each of which describes an independent stage with segmental and rule structure, and the totality of which presents a unified picture of the development of segmental and rule structure from the post-babbling stage to the full mastery of English phonology.' But such a developmental sequence may not be uni-dimensional in detail, since the child may attempt to work with incorrect hypotheses which are later rejected, or may regress at times. The first of these two approaches is parallel to the linguistic study of borrowving. The types of changes a child makes in 'borrowing' words from the language of the environment are as revealing of the borrower's phonological structure as are the changes which language X imposes on the borrowed words of language Y. Likewise, a series of phonologies covering a period of several years in the life of a particular child can be treated as a special case of the study of internal diachronic phonology. The writing of a phonology for a child's speech is especially problematic because there are no existent theories which can be directly applied. It is not at all obvious that we would want to attribute to the very young child the complicated rule structure which generative phonology (cf. Chomsky & Halle 1968) employs to describe mature speech. There is reason to believe that, from the beginnings of speech, the child incorporates phonological rules into his system, although his rules may bear no resemblance whatever to those of the

The Conflict of Culture in Africa

&F the spate of books published on Africa in I953, the most signicant to my mind was a novel called Blanket Boy's Moon. It tells the story of Monare of Lomontsa, a member of the Basuto tribe. As a child he had lived in the old tribal ways. With other young boys he had herded cattle on the hillsides. He had gone to the tribal circumcision school. Then, later, he had become a Christian. Christianity allows a man only one wife: the tribal society as many as he can afford. Thus the first conflict, the first set of personal tensions come into play: the new ways against the old, the influence of the priest pulling one way and that of the tribal elders another. Still later Monare goes to Johannesburg, the city of gold, where the ways of the priest, which are the ways of the white man, are in full mastery over all. When he returns to his village after his spell in the city he is conscious of going from the present into the past. And then his chief orders him to participate in a ritual murder. Monare the Christian is revolted. By Christian standards ritual murder is a crime against both God and man. But tribal pressure wins in the end and Monare takes part in the murder. The personality of Monare, the man, is now split beyond repair. He leaves the tribe because it is responsible for the evil thing he was forced to do. He wanders in fear through the cities of the Union of South Africa finding no peace, no resting place because in serving his tribal chief he has put himself outside the law and ethics of the Christian present. When arrest and death finally come his fear is matched and mastered by his relief. The long and terrible conflict is over at last. Now there can be peace. Let us allow for the fact that Monare is a fictional creation and therefore more consciously articulate than a man in real life might be. Let us further allow that ritual murder poses the problem in highly dramatic form. But having made those allowances the book still retains its validity as a serious attempt to throw light on what is, to my mind, the most pressing problem of Africa today: the problem of the African's transition from the tribal past into the technological present. There has been much discussion of tribalism in the past. The policy of indirect rule did, in a sense, endorse tribalism. It was often found most convenient not to interfere in any way with the structure of the tribal society but rather to bolster it up and to reinforce the authority of the chiefs and to rule through them. In some cases, the Kikuyu in Kenya are an example, the colonial government even introduced chiefs where these had not been part of the social structure before. To this day there exists an attitude that can be best expressed by the oft repeated statement, 'We do

The Conflict of Culture in Africa

&F the spate of books published on Africa in I953, the most signicant to my mind was a novel called Blanket Boy's Moon. It tells the story of Monare of Lomontsa, a member of the Basuto tribe. As a child he had lived in the old tribal ways. With other young boys he had herded cattle on the hillsides. He had gone to the tribal circumcision school. Then, later, he had become a Christian. Christianity allows a man only one wife: the tribal society as many as he can afford. Thus the first conflict, the first set of personal tensions come into play: the new ways against the old, the influence of the priest pulling one way and that of the tribal elders another. Still later Monare goes to Johannesburg, the city of gold, where the ways of the priest, which are the ways of the white man, are in full mastery over all. When he returns to his village after his spell in the city he is conscious of going from the present into the past. And then his chief orders him to participate in a ritual murder. Monare the Christian is revolted. By Christian standards ritual murder is a crime against both God and man. But tribal pressure wins in the end and Monare takes part in the murder. The personality of Monare, the man, is now split beyond repair. He leaves the tribe because it is responsible for the evil thing he was forced to do. He wanders in fear through the cities of the Union of South Africa finding no peace, no resting place because in serving his tribal chief he has put himself outside the law and ethics of the Christian present. When arrest and death finally come his fear is matched and mastered by his relief. The long and terrible conflict is over at last. Now there can be peace. Let us allow for the fact that Monare is a fictional creation and therefore more consciously articulate than a man in real life might be. Let us further allow that ritual murder poses the problem in highly dramatic form. But having made those allowances the book still retains its validity as a serious attempt to throw light on what is, to my mind, the most pressing problem of Africa today: the problem of the African's transition from the tribal past into the technological present. There has been much discussion of tribalism in the past. The policy of indirect rule did, in a sense, endorse tribalism. It was often found most convenient not to interfere in any way with the structure of the tribal society but rather to bolster it up and to reinforce the authority of the chiefs and to rule through them. In some cases, the Kikuyu in Kenya are an example, the colonial government even introduced chiefs where these had not been part of the social structure before. To this day there exists an attitude that can be best expressed by the oft repeated statement, 'We do