Some attributes of adjectives used by young children

Analysis of 24 spontaneous speech samples from children at 24 and 30 months revealed a correlated progression in the form, function and meaning of modifiers used with increased language development. Predicate adjectives were used to comment on transitory states of objects and predominated in the early speech samples. Attributive adjectives were used to subdivide classes or to specify among particular instances within classes on the basis of physical characteristics such as size, by use of a conventional type name, or by use of a possessive. Attributives predominated in the later speech samples. Differential use of a particular form appears to be a function of its cognitive and communicational usefulness rather than its syntactic derivation.     

Relation of cognitive operational performance to comprehension and production of dimensional adjectives

This study compared normal developing children, aged 34 to 51 mo., on comprehension and production of relative dimensional adjectives using object manipulations in a close elicitation procedure and on Piagetian operational tests of conservation of continuous quantity, length, reversibility and seriation. Analysis indicated a significant difference on the expressive language performance of the transitional and the concrete operational children over the preoperational children, but no significant differences occurred between the first two groups. Children who performed better on seriation were significantly better on expressive language performance. Children classified as operational for length performed better on all language measures than those classified as nonoperational. Reversibility and conservation of a continuous quantity did not differentiate children.     

Sentence comprehension and relative pronouns

Doubly self-embedded sentences, differing only in whether the relative pronouns were present or deleted, were presented to two groups of Ss who were required to respond to a word beginning with a particular letter in each sentence and to paraphrase the sentence. The results of both the phoneme monitor task and the paraphrase task indicated that comprehension was better when the relative pronouns were present than when they were deleted. These results are consistent with earlier results for the paraphrase task but are not consistent with earlier results for the phoneme monitor task. Possible reasons for the inconsistency were considered. It was concluded that the phoneme monitor task does reflect comprehension difficulty in a manner consistent with the paraphrase task and that deleting the relative pronouns does make comprehending self-embedded sentences more difficult.     

Absolute and relative perceptual codes in young children

Three experiments were conducted to ascertain whether young children's perceptual codes, as evidenced by choice reaction times, were related to either the absolute difference or the ratio between stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were shown pairs of line lengths and were asked to choose either the longer or shorter line within each pair. In Experiment 3, children chose which of two birds on a map was closer to themselves or to the experimenter. In all three experiments, children's reaction times were related to both the absolute differences and ratios between pairs of stimuli. The findings suggest that perceptual judgments in young children may be based on both absolute and relational codes.     

The minimum principle and the perception of absolute,common, and relative motions

Wheel-generated motions have served as a touchstone for discussion of the perception of wholes and parts since the beginning of Gestalt psychology. The reason is that perceived common motions of the whole and the perceived relative motions of the parts are not obviously found in the absolute motion paths of points on a rolling wheel. In general, two types of theories have been proposed as to how common and relative motions are derived from absolute motions: one is that the common motions are extracted from the display first, leaving relative motions as the residual; the other is that relative motions are extracted first leaving common motions as the residual. A minimum principle can be used to defend both positions, but application of the principle seems contingent on the particular class of stimuli chosen. We propose a third view. It seems that there are at least two simultaneous processes—one for common motions and one for relative motions—involved in the perception of these and other stimuli and that a minimum principle is involved in both. However, for stimuli in many domains the minimization of relative motion dominates the perception. In general, we propose that any given stimulus can be organized to minimize the complexity of either its common motions or its relative motions; that which component is minimized depends on which of two processes reaches completion first (that for common or that for relative motions); and that the similarity of any two displays depends on whether common or relative motions are minimized.     

Agrammatic comprehension of relative clauses

Four hypotheses that attempt to account for the comprehension deficit in agrammatism are put to an empirical test. The interest in them is in that they all view the deficit as highly selective. The first, proposed by D. Caplan and C. Futter (1986, Brain and Language, 27, 117-134), argues that agrammatic patients cannot carry out normal syntactic analysis beyond the category label of each incoming lexical item and are reduced to the use of a cognitive strategy that commends assignment of thematic roles to noun phrases merely by their linear position in the string. A second, less radical hypothesis (Y. Grodzinsky, 1986a, Brain and Language, 27, 135-159), accounts for the deficit differently, by deleting a particular kind of syntactic object (trace) from the otherwise normal representation, and augmenting the resulting, underspecified representation by a strategy, whose use is quite restricted. A third account that is tested contends that agrammatic aphasics fail to comprehend perceptually complex constructions, where the metric for complexity is determined by results obtained from comprehension tests of normal listeners. The fourth account (M. F. Schwartz, M. C. Linebarger, E. M. Saffran, and D. S. Pate, 1987, Language and Cognitive Processes, 2, 85-113) argues that the thematic transparency of a construction (whether or not thematic roles are assigned directly to positions) is the best predictor of the manner by which agrammatics can handle it. An empirical test is thus constructed, both to extend the evidential basis concerning the comprehension skills of these patients and to distinguish between the accounts. Four types of relative clauses are presented to the patients, where embedding type (center vs. right) is one variable, and location of gap (subject vs. object position) is the other. The patients are tested in a sentence-picture matching paradigm. The finding, that is rather robust, is that gap location is the best predictor of agrammatic performance: the patients perform well above chance on both types of subject gap relatives, and at chance levels on object gaps. It is then shown that the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (Grodzinsky, 1986a) is the only one among the accounts considered that is compatible with these data.     

Children's comprehension of relative clauses

A review of the literature on children's use of relative clause constructions reveals many contradictory findings. The suggestion is that some studies fail to take into account the two factors of embeddedness (role of complex noun phrase within the sentence) and focus (role of head noun in the relative clause). The experiment reported here attempted to reconcile the disparate findings and extend the range of constructions examined. 114 children between the ages of 3 and 7 served as subjects in a test of comprehension using an act-out procedure of 9 different relative clause sentences that exhaust the possible combination of 3 roles of the complex noun phrase in the sentence and 3 roles that the head noun plays within the relative clause (in each case, subject, driect object, and indirect object). All constructions were understood better with increasing age of the children sex and sentence set were nonsignificant variables. The results reveal a difficulty in ordering of the 9 types of construction that is in keeping with a prediction based on surface structure processing strategies.This research was supported by grant No. BNS73-09150 from the National Science Foundation to Professor Roger Brown.     

Linking production and comprehension processes: The case of relative clauses

Six studies investigated the relationship between production and comprehension by examining how relative clause production mechanisms influence the probabilistic information used by comprehenders to understand these structures. Two production experiments show that accessibility-based mechanisms that are influenced by noun animacy and verb type shape relative clause production. Two corpus studies confirm these production mechanisms in naturally occurring productions. Two comprehension studies found that nouns and verb types occurring in structures that speakers do not produce are difficult to comprehend. Specifically, the probability of producing a passive structure for a verb type in a given animacy configuration, as measured in the production and corpus studies, predicts comprehension difficulty in active structures. Results suggest that the way in which the verb roles are typically mapped onto syntactic arguments in production plays a role in comprehension. Implications for the relationship between production, comprehension and language learning are discussed.     

听障儿童错误信念理解与谎言理解的关系：情绪理解的调节作用

本研究主要探讨听障儿童自我/他人错误信念理解与谎言理解各层面的关系,以及情绪理解在其中的调节作用。实验1采用错误信念理解和谎言理解来探讨自我/他人错误信念理解与谎言理解各层面的关系。实验2增加了情绪理解任务,并探讨情绪理解在错误信念理解和谎言理解之间关系的机制。结果发现：（1）听障儿童他人错误信念理解、真假信息辨别、谎言意图理解的正确率显著不如典型发展儿童,且他人错误信念理解越好,越容易进行真假信息辨别和谎言意图理解;（2）典型发展儿童自我/他人错误信念理解越准确,谎言意图理解越好;（3）当听障儿童情绪理解得分较高时,自我/他人错误信念理解对谎言行为判断具有正向预测作用;（4）典型发展儿童情绪理解得分较高时,自我错误信念理解对真假信息辨别有正向预测作用,他人错误信念理解对谎言行为判断、真假信息辨别有正向预测作用。这些研究结果不仅表明听障儿童他人错误信念理解对谎言理解具有解释作用,而且表明高情绪理解在谎言理解中有促进作用以及表明高情绪理解在对错误信念理解与谎言理解中的调节作用更加显著。     

Repetition and comprehension of spoken sentences by reading-disabled children

The language problems of reading-disabled elementary school children are not confined to written language alone. These children often exhibit problems of ordered recall of verbal materials that are equally severe whether the materials are presented in printed or in spoken form. Sentences that pose problems of pronoun reference might be expected to place a special burden on short-term memory because close grammatical relationships obtain between words that are distant from one another. With this logic in mind, third-grade children with specific reading disability and classmates matched for age and IQ were tested on five sentence types, each of which poses a problem in assigning pronoun reference. On one occasion the children were tested for comprehension of the sentences by a forced-choice picture verification task. On a later occasion they received the same sentences as a repetition test. Good and poor readers differed significantly in immediate recall of the reflexive sentences, but not in comprehension of them as assessed by picture choice. It was suggested that the pictures provided cues which lightened the memory load, a possibility that could explain why the poor readers were not demonstrably inferior in comprehension of the sentences even though they made significantly more errors than the good readers in recalling them.     

Perspective-taking and comprehension of passive sentences by Japanese-speaking children

This study demonstrates that children's difficulties in the interpretation of passives are attributed to their perspective-taking ability. Thirty-six Japanese preschool children participated in act-out sentence comprehension tasks. They were asked to manipulate two toy animals to demonstrate the meaning of two types of stimulus sentences: Type I had the child's toy, whose reference involved the child's actual name (e.g., Jun-kun no neko Jun's cat) encoded as grammatical subject, while Type II had the child's toy encoded as non-subject. Since passive structures take the perspective of the patient-denoting subject NP, it is assumed that only Type I passives have the perspective that matches that of the child.The results show that children's performance on passives was significantly better in Type I than in Type II sentences. But this difference was not observed for active sentences. For those who showed (nearly) perfect performance on active sentences, only Type I passives were equally well understood. These results strongly suggest that perspective-taking difficulties mask children's true competence on passives and that even 6-year-olds may not yet have attained the full perspective-taking ability required for comprehension of passive sentences.     

Sensitivity to relative and absolute motion.

The threshold of sensitivity to movement could be governed by mechanisms that are sensitive either to change in spatial position, or directly to the movement itself. The use of spatially complex patterns (random-dot patterns) has been suggested to eliminate the former strategy allowing examination of the movement detecting mechanisms in isolation. By means of such a technique, thresholds for directional judgements were determined for patterns which underwent either a simple displacement or a shearing displacement. Thresholds for shearing motion were found to be around one half of those for simple motion, suggesting that relative, rather than absolute, motion governs performance for small displacements. This contrasts with previous experiments which showed that absolute motion governs performance for much larger displacements.     

The retention of nouns,adjectives, and verbs of sentences

This research compared the retention of nouns, adjectives and verbs of sentences. A model of the structure underlying the retention of sentences and in which deep structure constituent propositions are hierarchically related, was used to make predictions concerning the retention of these word classes. The model was not supported by the data and it was determined that latencies to recognize the words of a previously presented sentence were the same for all classes of words. This result indicated that for recognition (but not necessarily for other memory tasks), each word of a sentence is seperately or equally accessible (as long as inter-word imagery is the same). However, a further experiment showed that, although word class is not a variable, the image-arousing capacity of a word is. Latencies and error rates were much lower for high-imagery words than for low-imagery ones. The findings on error rates in recognizing words were interesting and pointed to a different model where the meaning representations and syntatic functions of words have an active role in sentence retention.     

Online recognition of music is influenced by relative and absolute pitch information

Three experiments explored online recognition in a nonspeech domain, using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults learned to associate abstract shapes with particular melodies, and at test they identified a played melody's associated shape. To implicitly measure recognition, visual fixations to the associated shape versus a distractor shape were measured as the melody played. Degree of similarity between associated melodies was varied to assess what types of pitch information adults use in recognition. Fixation and error data suggest that adults naturally recognize music, like language, incrementally, computing matches to representations before melody offset, despite the fact that music, unlike language, provides no pressure to execute recognition rapidly. Further, adults use both absolute and relative pitch information in recognition. The implicit nature of the dependent measure should permit use with a range of populations to evaluate postulated developmental and evolutionary changes in pitch encoding.