Hypothesis In Children Research Articles

A perceptual comparison: All-voiced versus typical reading passage read by children

The present investigation tested the modified vocalization hypothesis (Hutchinson and Brown, Journal of Fluency Disorders, 1978, 3, 149) in young stuttering subjects. In this study, stuttering children ages 7–13 yr were instructed to read two experimentally constructed passages. One passage contained both voiced and voiceless phonemes; the second passage was constructed using only voiced phonemes. Results indicated there was neither a quantitative nor a qualitative difference in the stuttering blocks during the reading of either experimental passage. These results would appear not to be supportive of the modified vocalization hypothesis in children; however, as has been indicative of similar studies, 8 of 22 subjects did demonstrate more dysfluencies during the reading of the passage that contained both voiced and voiceless phonemes.

Children's hypotheses about the animacy of actor and object nouns

This experiment investigated whether 3 and 4 year old children show systematic preferences for animate or inanimate nouns to function as actors and objects of simple active and passive voice sentences. The children had to choose a suitable referent for a nonsense word used in a sentence. They made their selection from an array of toys, the names of which were either animate or inanimate nouns. The children were divided into two groups according to their performance on a pretest of their comprehension of passive voice sentences. Children who did not understand the passive on the pretest showed a strong preference for an animate first noun and inanimate second noun regardless of sentence voice. Children who understood the passive showed this preference only on active voice sentences. These results suggest a relationship between the child's syntactic knowledge and semantic expectations.

A test of the developmental imagery hypothesis in children's associative learning.

A test of the developmental imagery hypothesis in children's associative learning.

Yesterday and tomorrow: Development of early understanding of the terms.

Since young children talk mainly about present events, it is interesting to consider how they come to understand the meaning of such words as yesterday and tomorrow that refer to the nonobservable past and future. Acquisition of the meaning of linguistic forms is a gradual process. Research of the past decade has provided information and insight into many aspects of the acquisition process. A still unresolved issue is the relative importance of the child's interaction with his environment and of some partially predetermined unfolding of linguistic structure and knowledge. Werner (Note 1) assigned a primary role to the child's interaction with his environment and to the child's hypotheses about relations in his surroundings. Werner suggested that when young children first use the words yesterday and tomorrow, both terms seem to refer to a nonpresent time. He observed that initially the terms were used as if they were interchangeable in meaning. Such usage might have resulted from the children's primitive hypotheses about the existence of nonpresent times.

Handedness: evaluation of binomial distribution hypothesis in children and adults.

7 timed, unilateral-hand function tasks were administered to 240 adults and 378 children. Discrepancies between right- and left-hand time scores were used to classify Ss into right-, left-, or “mixed-”handed categories. Only partial fit was observed between obtained frequencies of handedness and frequencies predicted from the assumption of a binomial distribution of handedness. Using a performance-defined criteria for handedness, more children than adults showed faster performance with their left hands and more adults than children showed equivalent time scores for both hands.