A LEXICAL-EXPECTATION MODEL FOR CHILDREN'S COMPREHENSION OF WH-QUESTIONS.
Item
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Title
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A LEXICAL-EXPECTATION MODEL FOR CHILDREN'S COMPREHENSION OF WH-QUESTIONS.
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Identifier
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AAI8119680
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identifier
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8119680
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Creator
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WINZEMER, JUDITH ANN.
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Contributor
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Prof. D Terence Langendoen
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Date
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1981
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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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Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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Tyack & Ingram (1977) and Ervin-Tripp (1970) report that two- to three-year-old children make the following type of error in answering wh-questions: When asked a question like When will the deer eat? a child might answer, meat. The child answers as if s/he had been asked What will the deer eat? Tyack & Ingram and Ervin-Tripp also report that there are within-wh-word differences in ease of comprehension depending upon the verb in the question. A comprehension model is proposed to account for these differences in ease of comprehension and for comprehension errors made by young children. The model posits the existence of lexical expectations, which are estimates of the likelihood that a sentence constituent will follow a verb. Lexical expectations are based on properties of the semantic representations of verbs. A constituent is expected if it specifies a non-redundant component of the semantic representation of a verb.;The lexical-expectation model predicts that wh-questions which query expected constituents will be easier to comprehend than questions which do not query expected constituents. For example, What will the deer eat? will be easier to comprehend than Where will the deer eat? because the constituent queried by what (i.e., the object eaten) is expected for the verb eat while the constituent queried by where (i.e., the spatial location of the activity) is not expected for the verb eat.;The model further predicts that if the child produces an incorrect constituent in answering a wh-question, the incorrect constituent will be the expected constituent for the verb. For example, in answer to When will the deer eat? a child should err by saying something like meat but not by saying in the woods.;The predictions of the model were tested in a study comprised of three tasks: a verb pretest designed to assess children's knowledge of the meaning of certain verbs, an elicitation task designed to elicit production of wh-words, and a comprehension task designed to assess the effect of the verb on comprehension. In the comprehension task, children were shown forty pictures and asked one question about each. There were eight questions for each of five wh-words: what, where, when, how and why. Of the eight questions for each wh-word, four queried expected constituents and four queried constituents that were not expected.;Results were that children responded correctly significantly more often on wh-questions which queried expected constituents. Errors involving producing an incorrect constituent were more frequent on wh-questions which did not query expected constituents. When errors were made, children overwhelmingly answered by producing expected constituents. These results have implications for the relationship between general rules and lexically specific information in language acquisition and language use.
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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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Psychology
