心理理论和语言能力的关系

心理理论和语言能力的关系已日益引起研究者们的关注.文章综述了以非人灵长类动物、正常儿童和特殊人群为对象进行的有关心理理论和语言关系的研究,从比较和发展的角度进行了理论分析.提出一定的语言能力水平也许是通过心理理论测试的前提条件,但二者有着不同的发展规律,并表现为复杂的共存关系.     

小学生语文学习观调查研究

采用选择题与开放题相结合的问卷调查方法,调查207名二、四、六年级学生的语文学习观(包括对语文知识性质与语文知识学习的认识),结果表明:(1)随着年级升高,学生对语文知识性质和学习过程的认识显著地越来越明确;(2)六、四年级的语文知识性质观平均得分显著高于二年级,越来越倾向于认为语文知识是相对的、相互联系的、开放性的;(3)六年级的语文学习过程观平均得分显著高于四、二年级,越来越倾向于认为语文学习不只是接受性的和练习性的,还是建构性的、想象的和探索性的。     

Counting in sign language

Do the visuomanual modality and the structure of the sequence of numbers in sign language have an impact on the development of counting and its use by deaf children? The sequence of number signs in Belgian French Sign Language follows a base-5 rule while the number sequence in oral French follows a base-10 rule. The accuracy and use of sequence number string were investigated in hearing children varying in age from 3 years 4 months to 5 years 8 months and in deaf children varying in age from 4 years to 6 years 2 months. Three tasks were used: abstract counting, object counting, and creation of sets of a given cardinality. Deaf children exhibited age-related lags in their knowledge of the number sequence; they made different errors from those of hearing children, reflecting the rule-bound nature of sign language. Remarkably, their performance in object counting and creating sets of given cardinality was similar to that of hearing children who had a longer sequence number string, indicating a better use of counting than predicted by their knowledge of the linguistic sequence of numbers.     

Creating “Maneuvering Room”: A Grounded Theory of Language and Influence in Marriage and Family Therapy

Influence in psychotherapy has been described as a characteristic of the therapist, a characteristic of the therapeutic relationship, and a negotiated process. This study combines grounded theory and task analysis to explore language patterns in facilitating change in family therapy. Thirty-one episodes of therapy were analyzed, resulting in the emergent concept of creating maneuvering room. Therapists introduce uncertainty into clients beliefs about problems then offer new ways of defining problems by speaking from three dimensions: therapist as expert or non-expert, therapist as participant or observer, or family members experiences as similar or different. The findings of this study support a possible common factor in family therapy.     

Temporal and spatial concepts in child language: conventional and configurational

The purpose of this research was to study the temporal and spatial systems of child language. Configurational time/space refers to the location of events/objects relative to referent events/objects (e.g., before/after or across/along) and conventional time/space refers to the specification of cycles/directions and the measurement of duration/distance (e.g., winter/fall or North/South). The research was designed to determine how configurational and conventional notions of time and space emerge in the child's language. The average age of the children in the cross-sectional design was: 3;9, 6;7, and 8;7. The children received a comprehension test that required them to match a sentence with a picture. In general, configurational contrasts were easier to comprehend than conventional contrasts, and, within the configurational problems, location requiring a single referent was easier than location requiring multiple referents. There was no overall difference between temporal and spatial dimensions. The role of conceptual development was discussed within the context of a comparison between first and second language acquisition.     

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.     

Teaching children with autism to ask questions about hidden objects

We taught 2 4‐year‐old children with autism to ask questions of an adult who held a closed box with a toy inside. The treatment package (modeling, prompting, and reinforcement) was evaluated with a multiple baseline design across the three question forms during training, generalization, and follow‐up evaluations. The first question form (“What's that?”) produced the name of the hidden item. The second form (“Can I see it?”) produced sight of it, and the third form (“Can I have it?”) produced the item itself. Both children learned to ask questions about hidden objects.     

Communicative development in Swedish children 16-28 months old: the Swedish early communicative development inventory--words and sentences

To describe the development of words and sentences in Swedish children 16-28 months old, 900 parental reports on 336 children were analyzed. Subjects were randomly selected from the national birth register, and there was a response rate of 88%. The assessments were made using the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory--words and sentences (SECDI--w&s). Age-based norms for productive vocabulary, pragmatic skills, grammar skills, and maximum length of utterance (MaxLU) were determined. We describe the development of feedback morphemes, semantic categories, and single words and tasks. Correlation across measures was significant, and especially strong between vocabulary size and grammar skills. Optimized positive predictive values were high for 25 to 28 month predictions (71%-88%), and vocabulary scores were found to be of particular predictive importance. No significant gender differences were detected. The clinical relevance of the instrument is discussed.     

Individual differences in children's emotion understanding: effects of age and language

Over the last two decades, it has been established that children's emotion understanding changes as they develop. Recent studies have also begun to address individual differences in children's emotion understanding. The first goal of this study was to examine the development of these individual differences across a wide age range with a test assessing nine different components of emotion understanding. The second goal was to examine the relation between language ability and individual differences in emotion understanding. Eighty children ranging in age from 4 to 11 years were tested. Children displayed a clear improvement with age in both their emotion understanding and language ability. In each age group, there were clear individual differences in emotion understanding and language ability. Age and language ability together explained 72% of emotion understanding variance; 20% of this variance was explained by age alone and 27% by language ability alone. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.