COMPREHENSION OF CONJOINED SENTENCES BY YOUNG NORMAL CHILDREN.
Item
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Title
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COMPREHENSION OF CONJOINED SENTENCES BY YOUNG NORMAL CHILDREN.
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Identifier
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AAI8103969
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identifier
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8103969
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Creator
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WURTZEL, SUSAN WARNER.
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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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Health Sciences, Speech Pathology
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Abstract
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This study explored the relationship between the presumably inherent predispositions which underlie the abilities to process language (described by Slobin, 1973) and the relative ease of understanding linguistic structures that conform to these universal biases. Specifically, this study focused on Slobin's prediction that clear marking of underlying semantic relations would facilitate sentence comprehension and that sentences with deleted grammatical relations would be more difficult to understand than those in which the material was present.;Forty children, ranging in age from 3 to 5 years, were presented with complex, conjoined sentences and asked to enact the sentences by manipulating toy objects. The linguistic stimuli included six types of conjoined sentences that provided redundant linguistic forms which were optionally deletable. This allowed for a comparison of sentence processing difficulty between sentences with overtly marked underlying semantic relations and sentences with fewer superficial cues to underlying meaning. Two matched sets of test sentences were prepared and counterbalanced so that although each subject heard unreduced and optionally reduced forms of all of the test sentence types; no subject heard both versions of the same sentence.;This investigation also sought to examine the influence of extrasyntactic factors on the comprehension strategies used by the children in their efforts to understand complex, conjoined sentences. This was accomplished by presenting all test constructions in three different semantic contexts.;The major goals of this research were: (1) to determine whether conjoined sentences which contain optionally deletable linguistic material are easier to understand when that material appears in its full form than when those redundant linguistic elements have been deleted; (2) to identify the comprehension strategies used by young children to understand these sentences, and (3) to identify the extrasyntactic factors which may affect the strategies used by children to understand these sentences.;The results of this study demonstrated that the deletion of various redundant linguistic forms from conjoined sentences did not have a uniform effect of increasing processing difficulty of these complex sentences for young children. Of the six different conjoined sentence types tested, only sentences with gapped verbs and sentences with conjoined noun phrases and verb phrases were significantly more difficult for the children to comprehend. In addition, significantly lower performance levels for reduced sentences presented in the inanimate context contrasted with the lack of differentiation in performance levels for unreduced and reduced sentences presented in the family and farm contexts. Sentences presented in the family context were found to be significantly easier to comprehend than sentences presented in both the farm and inanimate contexts.;The hierarchy of context difficulty and significant differences in comprehension difficulty of unreduced and reduced versions of the test sentences in the inanimate context appeared to result from the children's use of semantically based processing strategies. Further qualitative analyses of all enactment errors revealed a progression in strategy use characterized by changes in the relative reliance on semantic and linguistic heuristics. These developmental changes in basic strategy use were described by the proposal of simplification and conjunction strategies.
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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
