Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T20:54:33.116Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Syntactic and semantic factors in the acquisition of before and after*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Pamela L. Coker
Pamela L. Coker
Affiliation:
Southwest Regional Laboratory, Los Alamitos California
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Sixty kindergartners and sixty first graders were given three tasks to test their comprehension of the terms before and after. The results show that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. When the child does not know the meaning of a temporal term, he frequently interprets it as meaning the next-event-in-time. There are two strategies (main-clause-first and order-of-mention) that the child may adopt when interpreting temporal terms used as subordinating conjunctions. The use of these strategies appears to be independent of the child's knowledge of the meanings of the terms. Contrary to previous research, it was found that before does not seem to be learned before after nor does there appear to be any stage where after is treated to mean before.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 261 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

Most of this research was conducted at the Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development and was performed pursuant to Contract NE-C-00-3-0064 with theNational Institute of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This research is part of the author's doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1975, under the supervision of Kenneth Wexler. A version of this paper was presented at the 7th Annual Child Language Research Forum, Stanford, April 1975. Thanks are due to David Bessemer, James Coots, Peter Culicover, Bonita Ford, Rochel Gelman, Stanley Legum, William Watt, and Kenneth Wexler for their helpful suggestions throughout all aspects of this research. Additionally, I am most grateful to Mr Guy Carozzo, Principal of Boos Elementary School, for his cooperation in making subjects available. Author's address: Faculty in Psychology, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California 91711.

References

REFERENCES

Amidon, A. & Carey, P. (1972). Why five-year-olds cannot understand before and after. JVLVB 11. 417–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrie-Blackley, S. (1973). Six-year-old children's understanding of sentences adjoined with time adverbs. JPsycholingRes 2. 153–65.Google ScholarPubMed
Bartlett, E. J. (1976). Sizing things up: the acquisition of the meaning of dimensional adjectives. JChLang 3. 205–59.Google Scholar
Bever, T. G. (1970). The comprehension and memory of sentences with temporal relations. In Flores d'arcais, G. B. & Levelt, W. J. M. (eds), Advances in psycholingistics. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Brewer, W. F. & Stone, J. B. (1975). Acquisition of spatial antonym pairs. JExpChPsych 19. 299–307.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1969). Language acquisition: the child's spontaneous description of events in time. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1971). On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after. JVLVB 10. 266–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1972). On the child's acquisition of antonyms in two semantic fields. JVLVB 11. 750–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1973). What's in a word? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language. In Moore, T. E. (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1970). The primitive nature of children's relational concepts. In Hayes, J. R. (ed), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1973). Space, time, semantics and the child. In Moore, T. E. (ed), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Coker, P. L. (1975). On the acquisition of temporal terms. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine.Google Scholar
Coker, P. L. & Legum, S. E. (1975). An empirical test of semantic hypotheses relevant to the language of young children. In Working Papers on the Kindergarten Program: Quality Assurance, SWRL for Educational Research and Development (Los Alamitos, California).Google Scholar
Coots, J. H. (1976). Children's knowledge and acquisition of polar spatial adjectives. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Utah.Google Scholar
Cromer, R. (1968). The development of temporal reference during the acquisition of language. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Donaldson, M. & Balfour, G. (1968). Less is more: a study of language comprehension in children. BJPsych 59. 461–71.Google Scholar
Donaldson, M. & Wales, R. (1970). On the acquisition of some relational terms. In Hayes, J. R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Ehri, L. C. (1976). Comprehension and production of adjectives and seriation. JChLang 3. 369–84.Google Scholar
Eilers, R. E., Oller, D. K. & Ellington, J. (1974). The acquisition of word-meaning for dimensional adjectives: the long and short of it. JChLang 1. 195–204.Google Scholar
Ferreiro, E. & Sinclair, H. (1971). Temporal relationships in language. IntJPsych 6. 39–47.Google Scholar
French, L. A. & Brown, A. L. (1977). Comprehension of before and after in logical and arbitrary sequences. JChLang 4. 247–56.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (1975). Evidence for the psychological reality of semantic components: the verbs of possession. In Norman, D. A. & Rumelhart, D. E. (eds), Explorations in cognition. San Francisco: Freeman.Google Scholar
Glucksberg, S., Hay, A. & Danks, J. H. (1976). Words in utterance contexts: young children do not confuse the meanings of same and different. ChDev 47. 737–41.Google Scholar
Hatch, E. (1971). The young child's comprehension of time connectives. ChDev. 42. 2111–13.Google Scholar
Haviland, S. E. & Clark, E. V. (1974). ‘This man's father is my father's son’: a study of the acquisition of English kin terms. JChLang 1. 23–47.Google Scholar
Johnson, H. L. (1973). The meaning of before and after for preschool children. JExpChPsych 19. 88–99.Google Scholar
Palermo, D. S. (1973). More about less: a study of language comprehension. JVLVB 12. 211–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Townsend, D. J. (1976). Do children interpret ‘marked’ comparative adjectives as their opposites? JChLang 3. 385–96.Google Scholar
Wales, R. J., Garman, M. A. G. & Griffiths, P. D. (1976). More or less the same: a markedly different view of children's comparative judgments in three cultures. In Wales, R. J. & Walker, E. (eds), New approaches to language mechanisms. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar