EFFECTS OF INTERVENTION ON RELATIVE CLAUSE SENTENCE PROCESSING IN YOUNG NORMAL CHILDREN.
Item
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Title
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EFFECTS OF INTERVENTION ON RELATIVE CLAUSE SENTENCE PROCESSING IN YOUNG NORMAL CHILDREN.
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Identifier
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AAI8014985
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identifier
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8014985
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Creator
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ROTH, FROMA P.
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Contributor
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Helen Cairns
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Date
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1980
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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In order to determine whether direct intervention can accelerate normal children's language comprehension abilities, 18 children, ranging in age from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 years, participated in this three phase research project. The Pretest Phase served as a screening procedure for the selection of subjects. The Intervention Phase consisted of three training sessions for each of three training conditions: the Explicit Training Condition (Condition I), the Implicit Training Condition (Condition II), and the Control Condition (Condition III). The Posttest Phase was designed to test learning of the target sentence structures.;The linguistic stimuli consisted of four types of relative clause sentences. The sentences used in the Pretest and Posttest Phases were different from those use in the Intervention Phase. The children's task in each phase was to enact the sentence by manipulating toy objects.;The training procedures were developed to indirectly test the predictions of Slobin's (1973) putative universal that rearrangement of word order and interruption of related clausal constituents result in increased sentence processing complexity for young children. Subjects in Condition I were taught noninterrupted versions of the relative clause sentences. The training procedure for subjects in Condition II was designed to rely solely on the children's natural inductive capacities for acquiring language. These children heard the relative clause sentences only in their surface form. The subjects in Condition III served as controls and received training on two-clause conjoined sentences.;The two major hypotheses tested in this study were that (1) young children can be trained to understand relative clause sentences at an accelerated rate and (2) that Explicit Training (Condition I) would be a more effective intervention procedure than Implicit Training (Condition II).;The results of this study clearly demonstrated that direct intervention was effective in teaching children to understand relative clause sentences. The solid improvement in the performance of the subjects in the two experimental training conditions on the relative clause sentences between the Pre- and Posttest Phases contrasted significantly with the lack of improvement demonstrated by subjects in the control condition, confirming the first major hypothesis of this study. However, the degree of improvement demonstrated on the relative clause sentences was similar for subjects in Conditions I and II, disconfirming the second hypothesis.;In addition, subject relative sentences with subject focus and object relative sentences with subject focus were found to be the easiest to comprehend, while subject relatives with object focus caused children the greatest difficulty. This order of difficulty among the sentence types was consistent for all three Conditions and across the Pretest-Posttest Phases of the experiment.;Qualitative analysis of each enactment error was also completed. The most salient finding was that the First Noun strategy accounted for the majority of errors, providing support for the canonical-sentoid hypothesis described in the literature.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Speech and Hearing Sciences
