THE EFFECT OF INFORMATION ABOUT SENTENCE REFERENTS ON CHILDREN'S OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING OF A SYNTACTIC RULE.
Item
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Title
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THE EFFECT OF INFORMATION ABOUT SENTENCE REFERENTS ON CHILDREN'S OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING OF A SYNTACTIC RULE.
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Identifier
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AAI8222967
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identifier
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8222967
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Creator
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MORGULAS, SUSAN SPIES.
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Contributor
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Barry J. Zimmerman
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Date
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1982
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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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Education, Educational Psychology
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Abstract
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The present research focused on examining the effectiveness of verbal modeling in promoting comprehension of a syntactic rule. The primary purpose of the study was to test the hypothesis that receiving information about the content of modeled passive sentences helps children to understand the meaning of those sentences and to induce the syntactic rule governing them. The second purpose was to replicate Brown's (1976) finding that modeling supplemented with concrete enactive referents leads to syntactic rule learning.;Nursery school children were pretested for comprehension of reversible passives. Children failing to demonstrate comprehension skill were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions or to a no-modeling control condition. Children in the experimental conditions received modeling treatment. They heard passive sentences embedded in a novel story which contained no extra-syntactic clues to sentence meaning.;Before modeling, children in the relevant information conditions listened to descriptions of the dispositions and probable behavior of the grammatical agents and objects of the modeled sentences. Youngsters in the irrelevant information conditions heard information about the story characters but irrelevant to the actions described by the model. Modeling with enactment subjects watched the model use toys to demonstrate the actions named in the modeled sentences. The presence or absence of enactment was factorially varied with the two types of prior information. One posttest assessed children's understanding of the story sentences. Two additional posttests measured transfer of learning.;The data were analyzed in a multivariate analysis of covariance with pretest score as the covariate. A series of comparisons between children in the modeling conditions and the no-modeling controls was also made. The pattern of results leads to the conclusion that the combination of prior relevant information and enactment, and not either variable alone, constituted the crucial factor in syntactic rule learning. The results are discussed in terms both of the subprocesses held by social learning theory to be activated during learning by observation and of the social learning research on language skills. Implications for education are also discussed.
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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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Educational Psychology
