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Contextual influences on children's spoken and written explanations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Morag L. Donaldson
Morag L. Donaldson*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, UK EH8 9JZ
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Abstract

The relative influences of medium and context variables were investigated by comparing 7- and 8-year-old children's spoken and written explanations in varying contexts: a story task, a question task, a sentence completion task, and a whole sentence production task. In the story task, performance in a “purpose” condition (which provided a specific communicative purpose for the production of an explanation) was compared with performance in a “neutral” condition. The frequency of explanations containing correct causal expressions was significantly higher in the purpose condition than in the neutral condition and significantly lower in the story task than in the three more structured tasks. In contrast to these contextual influences, performance in the written medium was very similar to performance in the spoken medium.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 1996 , pp. 355 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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