Picture Selection Task Research Articles

Children’s On-line Processing of Scrambling in Japanese

This study investigates the on-line processing of scrambled sentences in Japanese by preschool children and adults using a combination of self-paced listening and speeded picture selection tasks. The effects of a filler-gap dependency, reversibility, and case markers were examined. The results show that both children and adults had difficulty in comprehending scrambled sentences when they were provided as reversible sentences. The reversibility effect was significant for children, whereas the interaction of reversibility and a filler-gap dependency was significant for adults. However, this does not indicate that children's parsing is fundamentally different from that of adults. For those children who processed the nominative and accusative case markers equally fast, the reactivation of the dislocated constituent was observed in the gap position. These results suggest that children's processing is basically the same as adults' in that their sentence processing is incremental and they parse a gap to form a filler-gap dependency.

Persian speaking children's acquisition of relative clauses

The current study examined the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Persian is a relatively unique data point in crosslinguistic research in acquisition because it is a head-final language with post-nominal RCs. Children (N = 51) aged 2 to 7 years completed a picture-selection task that tested their comprehension of subject-, object-, and genitive-RCs. The results showed that the children experienced greater difficulty processing object and genitive RCs when compared to subject RCs, suggesting that the children have particular difficulty processing sentences with non-canonical word order. The results are discussed with reference to a number of theoretical accounts proposed to account for sentence difficulty.

The Comprehension and Production of Wh-Questions in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Hearing loss during the critical period for language acquisition restricts spoken language input. This input limitation, in turn, may hamper syntactic development. This study examined the comprehension, production, and repetition of Wh-questions in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. The participants were 11 orally trained Hebrew-speaking children aged 9.1-12.4 with moderate-to-profound hearing loss from birth, who consistently used hearing aids or cochlear implants and who had difficulties understanding relative clauses. Experiment 1 tested the comprehension of Wh-questions using a picture selection task, comparing subject with object questions and who- with which-questions; Experiment 2 tested the production of subject and object who-questions using an elicitation task; and Experiment 3 tested the repetition of Wh-questions and other structures derived by Wh-movement. All the DHH participants showed difficulty in the comprehension, production, and repetition of object questions, and their performance was significantly below that of hearing children. In contrast, they repeated embedded sentences without movement well, indicating that their deficit is in syntactic movement rather than embedding or the CP node in the syntactic tree. The results provide additional evidence that DHH children have difficulties with Wh-movement and emphasize that Wh-questions, which are crucial for communication, can be severely impaired in these children.

Which questions are most difficult to understand?: The comprehension of Wh questions in three subtypes of SLI

This study explored Wh question comprehension in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI, comparing which and who questions and subject and object questions. The participants were 28 Hebrew-speaking children with SySLI aged 9;3-12;0, and the control group included 25 typically-developing children aged 9;1-10;0. The study used three picture selection tasks. The results indicated that the children with syntactic SLI had a severe deficit in the comprehension of which object questions. Most of them performed randomly on these questions, and each of them performed significantly poorer than the control group. They understood subject questions better than object questions, and who questions better than which questions. These results join a growing body of evidence suggesting a deficit in sentences derived by Wh movement in syntactic SLI. We suggest that this deficit relates to the assignment of a thematic role to an element which moved across another argument of the same type. The second part of the study explored subtypes of SLI. We compared the comprehension of Wh questions in three groups of children with SLI: syntactic SLI (S-SLI or SySLI), lexical SLI (LeSLI), and pragmatic SLI (PraSLI). The results showed that whereas children with SySLI have a significant deficit in the comprehension of which object questions, children with LeSLI and PraSLI understand Wh questions without difficulty.

The interpretation of stressed and non-stressed pronouns in Spanish language breakdown

Background: Earlier research has indicated that patients with agrammatic Broca's aphasia have problems with constraints on the intra-sentential interpretation of object pronouns, incorrectly allowing them to refer to the subject of the same sentence. However, these studies do not show how agrammatic patients deal with constraints on the extra-sentential interpretation of pronouns. Also, studies that did investigate patients' extra-sentential interpretation of pronouns were on English and Dutch, languages with a pronominal system that differs substantially from the pronominal system of Romance languages, such as Spanish. Aims: To test Spanish agrammatic patients on the interpretation of stressed and non-stressed subject and object pronouns in coordinated structures (the Spanish counterparts of sentences such as “First the girl pushed the mother, and than she / SHE pushed the boy”), in order to investigate whether they exhibit the same referential preferences as non-brain-damaged individuals and English- and Dutch-speaking patients. Methods & Procedures: In the present study seven Spanish patients with agrammatic Broca's aphasia and six non-brain-damaged adults were tested with a picture selection task on their interpretation of non-stressed and stressed pronouns in coordinated sentences. Patients were presented coordinated sentences and were shown four pictures, one on the left page, three on the right page. The left page picture represents the first conjunct of the test sentence, the right page represent the two theoretically possible referents of the pronoun (subject of the first conjunct, or object of the first conjunct) and a non-related picture. The patient's task was to indicate out of the three pictures the one that correctly represented the meaning of the second conjunct of the test sentence. Outcomes & Results: Agrammatic individuals exhibit difficulties with the interpretation of non-stressed object pronouns, and even more difficulties with the interpretation of contrastively stressed pronouns. An additional finding is that they tend to prefer subjects as the antecedents of pronouns. Conclusions: We claim that patients' problems with the interpretation of pronouns are not the result of missing syntactic knowledge, but are due to patients' limited ability to keep syntactic configurations in their syntactic working memory. We argue that their preference for subjects as antecedents for pronouns reflects a fall-back strategy in agrammatic patients when, as a result of limited processing resources, syntax-based interpretative operations fail.

“It's not like [I'm] Chinese and Canadian. I am in between”: Ethnicity and Students' Conceptions of Historical Significance

This article explores the relationship between students' ethnic identities and their ascriptions of historical significance to moments in Canada's past. Twenty-six grade 12 students living in an ethnically diverse urban centre in British Columbia, Canada participated. Phenomenographic research methods were followed, with a range of data informing the findings. In groups, students completed a “picture-selection task” during which they were asked to make decisions about the historical significance of particular events and themes in Canadian history. Students were asked to describe their ethnic identity and then reflect on the ways in which their ethnic identity may have influenced the decisions they made during the picture-selection task. Analysis determined that students employed five types of historical significance and three narrative templates to construct the history of Canada. Students used specific types of historical significance depending on the narrative(s) they used. The students' ethnic identities played a central role in determining which narrative template(s) they employed and the criteria they used to select the events for their narratives. Many students articulated complicated notions of their identities, with some perceiving that particular “sides” of their identity were at play, or in use, during the research task. Students were able to engage in metacognitive thinking because of a research design that pushed them to articulate their beliefs about the relationship between identity (self-ascribed) and the narrative they constructed. Implications for teaching and further research are explored.

The Linguistic Affiliation Constraint and phoneme recognition in diglossic Arabic

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target phonemes and distractors, the study showed that children's recognition of Standard phonemes was poorer than that of Spoken phonemes. This finding was interpreted as indicating a deficiency in the phonological representations of Standard words. Next, the study tested two hypotheses regarding the specific consequences of under-specified phonological representations: phonological encoding versus phonological processing. These hypotheses were addressed through an analysis of the relative power of distractors. The findings revealed that children's difficulty in accessing Standard Arabic phonemes was due to a difficulty in the phonological encoding of Standard words. We discuss the implications of the findings for language and literacy development in diglossic Arabic.

More individual differences in language attainment: How much do adult native speakers of English know about passives and quantifiers?

This paper provides experimental evidence suggesting that there are considerable differences in native language attainment, and that these are at least partially attributable to individual speakers’ experience. Experiment 1 tested high academic attainment (hereafter, HAA) and low academic attainment (LAA) participants’ comprehension using a picture selection task. Test sentences comprised passives and two variants of the universal quantification construction. Active constructions were used as a control condition. HAA participants performed at ceiling in all conditions; LAA participants performed at ceiling only on actives. As predicted by usage-based accounts, the order of difficulty of the four sentence types mirrored their frequency. Experiment 2 tested whether the less-educated participants’ difficulties with these constructions are attributable to insufficient experience. After a screening test, low scoring participants were randomly assigned to two training groups. The passive training group were given a short training session on the passive construction; and the quantifier training group were trained on sentences with quantifiers. A series of post-training tests show that performance on the trained construction improved dramatically, and that the effect was long-lasting.

Anaphora resolution in near-native Italian grammars: Evidence from native speakers of Croatian

This paper reports the results of an experimental study on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora in Italian, by native Italian speakers and near-native Italian speakers whose L1 is Croatian. In a picture-selection task, the two groups of speakers had to identify the antecedents of third person null and overt subject pronouns in ambiguous forward and backward anaphora sentences and their unambiguous counterparts. In all contexts under investigation, near-natives expressed native-like antecedent preferences, indicating that they have acquired not only the syntactic, but also the discourse-pragmatic constraints on the realisation of pronominal subjects in Italian. Given that Croatian and Italian do not differ with respect to the licensing and distribution of pronominal forms, the results provide additional evidence for an account attributing the well-attested tendency of bilingual speakers of a null subject language and a non-null subject language to overuse and misinterpret overt subjects in the null subject language to crosslinguistic influence.

Comprehension of idiomatic verb + particle constructions in 6- to 11-year-old children

The ability to comprehend non-literal language is still developing throughout the school years. This study analysed the responses of a large stratified sample of 6- to 11-year-old children to a forced-choice picture selection task testing a common type of idiomatic expression: verb+particle constructions such as `look up' and `call off'. Effects for frequency were found in children's comprehension of particular verb+particle constructions. Furthermore, distractor analysis revealed that children may not have been applying simple decompositional semantic strategies in their attempts to comprehend unfamiliar verbs. It seemed that syntactic features of the verbs were also taken into account, and that children made use of contextual information only in certain circumstances. It is argued that children's choices of distractors indicated that they employed a holistic rather than an analytic approach to comprehension of unfamiliar particle verbs.

The comprehension of Turkish relative clauses in second language acquisition and agrammatism

The purposes of this study are to test whether the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses is easier than that of object relative (OR) clauses in Turkish and to investigate whether the comprehension of SRs can be better explained by the linear distance hypothesis or structural distance hypothesis (SDH). The question is examined in two groups of second language (L2) learners of different proficiency levels and a few agrammatics expected to show a similar pattern. Each participant is asked to comprehend 15 sentences containing SRs and ORs via a picture selection task. The results indicate that comprehension of SRs is easier than that of ORs for intermediate level L2 learners, whereas there is no significant difference between the types of relative clauses for early learners. Another result is that early learners produce errors similar to those of agrammatics, which are explained through trace deletion and referential strategy. These findings on Turkish provide significant support for the SDH.

How do adults and children process referentially ambiguous pronouns?

In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigate adults' and children's on-line processing of referentially ambiguous English pronouns. Sixteen adults and 16 four-to-seven-year-olds listened to sentences with either an unambiguous reflexive (himself) or an ambiguous pronoun (him) and chose a picture with two characters that corresponded to those in the sentence. For adults, behavioural data, responses and reaction times indicate that pronouns are referentially ambiguous. Adults' eye movements show a competition between the looks to sentence-internal and -external referents for pronouns, but not for reflexives. Children overwhelmingly prefer the sentence-internal referent in the off-line picture selection task. However, their eye movements reveal implicit awareness of referential ambiguity that develops earlier than their explicit knowledge in the picture selection task. This discrepancy between performance on a looking measure and a pointing measure in the children's processing system is explained by a general dissociation between implicit and explicit knowledge proposed in recent literature on cognitive development.

Methods for Assessing Children's Syntax

Part 1 Production data: collecting spontaneous production data, Katherine Demuth analyzing children's spontaneous speech, Karin Stromswold what children know about what they say - elicited imitation as a research method for assessing children's syntax, Barbara Lust et al elicited production, Rosalind Thornton. Part 2 Comprehension data: the intermodal preferential looking paradigm - a window onto emerging language comprehension, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff the picture selection task, LouAnn Gerken and Michele E. Shady the act-out task, Helen Goodluck questions after stories - on supplying context and eliminating it as a variable, Jill de Villiers and Thomas Roeper on-line methods, Cecile McKee. Part 3 Judgement data: the truth-value judgement task, Peter Gordon eliciting judgements of grammaticality and reference, Dana McDaniel and Helen Smith Cairns. Part 4 General issues: crosslinguistic investigation, Celia Jakubowicz assessing morphosyntax in clinical settings, Laurence B. Leonard issues in designing research and evaluating data pertaining to children's syntactic knowledge, Jennifer Ryan Hsu and Louis Michael Hsu.

The role of the L1 grammar in the L2 acquisition of segmental structure

Acquisition of segmental structure in first language acquisition is accomplished through the interaction of Universal Grammar and the learner's detection of phonemic contrasts in the input (Rice and Avery, 1995; Brown and Matthews, 1993,1997). This article investigates the acquisition of the English /l–r/,/b–v/ and /f–v/ contrasts by second language learners whose L1s do not contrast these segments. Based on L1 phonological acquisition and infant speech perception research,a model of phonological interference is developed which explains how the influence of the L1 phonology originates and identifies the level of phonological knowledge that impinges upon L2 acquisition. It is proposed that if a learner's L1 grammar lacks the phonological feature that differentiates a particular non-native contrast, he or she will be unable to perceive the contrast and therefore unable to acquire the novel segmental representations. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, two experimental studies were conducted. Experiment 1 investigates the acquisition of /l/ and /r/ by Chinese and Japanese speakers; the acquisition of the /l–r/, /b–v/ and /f–v/ contrasts by Japanese speakers is compared in experiment 2. The results from an AX discrimination task and a picture selection task indicate that successful acquisition of a non-native contrast is constrained by the learner's L1 grammar. Differences between Chinese and Japanese speakers (experiment 1) and differences in the acquisition of several different contrasts among Japanese speakers (experiment 2) are argued to reflect subtle phonological properties of the learners' respective L1s. These findings demonstrate that a speaker's L1 grammar may actually impede the operation of UG, preventing the L2 learner from acquiring a non-native phonemic contrast.

A cross-linguistic study of children's comprehension of universal quantifiers: a comparison of Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and English

The development of children's grasp of lexical cues to universal quantification was investigated in 3- to 10-year-olds and in adult native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and English. The experiments focused on children's acquisition of the English quantifiers all and each and their counterparts in Mandarin and Portuguese. Participants selected best-fitting interpretations of sentences containing universal quantification from sets of pictures portraying collective, distributive, and exhaustive states or activities. The collective representation corresponds to the meaning of all in 'All of the turtles are in a tank', with the 'group' interpretation that all the turtles are in the same tank. The distributive representation assumes a pairing and is canonically associated with each. For the sentence 'Each turtle is in a tank', turtles and tanks would ideally be in one-to-one correspondence. The exhaustive representation corresponds to the favoured inter pretation of sentences with two plural definite noun phrases. For the sentence 'The turtles are in the tanks', sets of turtles and tanks would be associated exhaustively with each other with none left over. The results of the picture selection task demonstrate that children learning Mandarin and Portuguese acquire correspon dences between collective and the distributive interpretations and natural language expressions by age five. For young American children the universal quantifiers all and each are not closely coupled with collective and distributive interpretations initially. Children learning English gradually master a whole system of cues which jointly influence quantifier interpretation. Across the languages tested, strong evidence for the early availability of an exhaustive representation was not found.

What do children know about the universal quantifiers all and each?

Children's comprehension of the universal quantifiers all and each was explored in a series of experiments using a picture selection task. The first experiment examined children's ability to restrict a quantifier to the noun phrase it modifies. The second and third experiments examined children's ability to associate collective, distributive, and exhaustive representations with sentences containing universal quantifiers. The collective representation corresponds to the “group” meaning (for All the flowers are in a vase all of the flowers are in the same vase). The distributive representation implies a pairing (e.g., each flower paired with a vase for Each flower is in a vase). The exhaustive representation exhausts both sets (e.g., for The flowers are in the vases all the flowers are in vases and all the vases have flowers in them). Four- to 10-year-old children had little difficulty restricting the quantifier all to the noun it modified in a task which required them to attend to the group feature of all. In contrast, only 9- and 10-year-olds were able to solve the task when the quantifier was each and the pictures showed entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. Children showed a preference for associating collective pictures with sentences containing all and distributive pictures with sentences containing each. The results suggest that between the ages of 5 and 10 years, children's semantic representations undergo less radical changes than others have proposed. Instead, developmental change may occur gradually as children acquire linguistic cues which map onto existing semantic representations.

The effect of instructions on view‐specificity in young children's drawing and picture selection

While young children have been characterized as drawing what they know rather than what they see, recent research has shown that they can make view‐specific drawings under some task conditions. The goals of this experiment were first, to learn if 5‐year‐old children would draw and select view‐specific pictures of a mug with its handle turned out of view when the task instructions emphasized this as the goal, and second, to compare performance on the drawing and picture selection tasks. Children participated in both tasks after hearing either a standard or clarified version of the instructions. The results showed first, that children who heard the clarified instructions were more likely to provide view‐specific responses on both tasks, and second, that children were more likely to give a view‐specific response on the picture selection task than on the drawing task.

Children's understanding of referential messages produced by deaf and hearing speakers

Children 4 to 10 years of age were presented with referential messages that varied in message adequacy and speech quality and were required to choose the intended referent from a set of four alternatives. Follow ing feedback regarding their choice, they evaluated the message as good or bad and provided reasons for their evaluation. Half of the messages had sufficient information to define the referent uniquely; half had insufficient or ambiguous information. Moreover, half of the messages were produced by hearing children and half by deaf children. Children's comprehension and evaluation of messages changed sys tematically with age, as did the basis for these evaluations. The 4- and 5-year-olds performed poorly on the picture selection task but evaluated most messages as good; 6-year-olds rated messages as good if they had chosen the correct referent, even by guessing. From 8 years of age, children judged the adequacy of messages independent of outcome and linked their justifications to relevant details of the mes sages. Messages that were fully intelligible to adults but had atypical speech quality resulted in poorer performance and evaluations than did messages with normal speech quality for children of all ages.

Children's Comprehension of Deictic Categories in Oral and Written Language

THIS STUDY examined children's ability to understand the use of deictic terms in oral and written language. Three categories of words with deictic content were investigated: pronouns (e.g., I, you), locatives (e.g., this, here), and motion verbs (e.g., come, go). Three groups of second-grade students performed three types of tasks: oral-language tasks, written-language tasks, and picture-selection tasks. Planned comparisons indicated that written-language tasks were more difficult than comparable oral-language tasks, that motion verbs were more difficult for children to interpret, and that children found it more difficult to interpret deictic terms when they were observers than when they were participants in a conversation. Children had as much difficulty interpreting deictic terms in written texts addressed to the reader as in written texts representing quoted dialogue. Factors that contributed to the difficulty children had in interpreting words with deictic content are discussed.

Comprehension of standard English at varied speaking rates by children whose major dialect is black English

Abstract Comprehension of spoken Standard English was measured via a picture selection task for 80 Black English (BE) speaking and 80 Standard English (SE) speaking children at four age levels between 5 years, 6 months, and 9 years, 6 months. Test stimuli consisted of four syntactically matched groups of eight sentences divided into two levels of difficulty. The four groups of sentences were heard by all Ss at four different speaking rates from 4.9 (fast) through 2.5 (slow) syllables per second. Results showed that BE speaking children had greater difficulty comprehending spoken SE than the SE speaking control Ss. Significant age and difficulty effects were found for both groups; a significant rate effect was found for the BE speaking group only; and sentence difficulty was found to interact differently with age for the two groups.