7 - Experimental study of the comprehension and metalinguistic awareness of the pasts of direct vs. indirect experience

Summary

Children's knowledge of the modal distinction between the inferential past and the past of direct experience was also studied from the point of view of comprehension. An experimental study was carried out to find out whether young children understand that a speaker who refers to a situation in -mlş past has not witnessed the event itself but is making an inference from its observable results, while one who refers to a situation in -DI past has experienced it directly. It was also of primary interest to uncover the underlying procedures that are at work in achieving such comprehension. Based on the assumption that these covert processes can be inferred from the justifications children give for their performance on the task, an additional analysis was performed on the data. This analysis, then, also reflects the metalinguistic awareness gained by the subjects during the course of the experiment.

Procedure

The subjects were presented with eight short story-like events each represented by a sequence of four pictures. All the story items involved the same characters and were introduced as the adventures of three friends, two boys and a girl (Ali, Ahmet and Fatoş). The subjects were told that this was a game called ‘Find out who said it’. At the end of each story, the investigator produced an utterance making a statement about the event in the story, and asked the child to identify its speaker in the last picture of the sequence.