THE UPS AND DOWNS OF 'BEFORE' AND 'AFTER': CONTEXTUAL CONTROLS OF UNDERSTANDING.
Item
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Title
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THE UPS AND DOWNS OF 'BEFORE' AND 'AFTER': CONTEXTUAL CONTROLS OF UNDERSTANDING.
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Identifier
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AAI8302497
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identifier
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8302497
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Creator
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CARNI, ELLEN IRIS.
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Contributor
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Katherine Nelson
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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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Psychology, Experimental | Education, Educational Psychology
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Abstract
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This research examined the influence of real world knowledge on preschoolers' understanding of before and after. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children were tested for the comprehension and production of these terms across event sequences that had real world (logical) and arbitrary temporal orders. In the comprehension test, the subjects answered before/after questions referring to the order of events in sequences they enacted with toys. There was a main effect of age but not of sequence type. The four- and five-year-olds showed clear comprehension, but performance among the three-year-olds appeared to be inflated by context-sensitive but non-linguistic strategies of response. In a second comprehension measure that used pictured events, the three-year-olds were substantially better with logical than with arbitrary sequences. Event knowledge did not support comprehension within the same subjects across tasks, however. Two production measures, when questions and sentence repetitions, showed increasingly correct performance with age but failed to demonstrate superior performance with logical sequences. An influence of real world knowledge was reflected in the subjects' response strategies but did not clearly support correct production of before and after. These strategies were common among the three-year-olds; the types of strategies and frequency of use changed with age in a developmental direction. Comprehension of before/after was superior to production at age three but converged with age. Four- and five-year-olds made some individual variations in performance across the three tasks, while three-year-olds were highly inconsistent across tasks. It was proposed that a basic understanding of before/after is present during the fourth year, but its use is governed by nonlinguistic constraints. Event knowledge combines with task demands to produce context/paradiam-specific response strategies that control the child's performance with these terms. Event knowledge may thus be necessary to support the early understanding of before and after but insufficient to support the display of this understanding. Therefore, the use of both context-sensitive methods and multiple measures of assessment were encouraged for constructing developmental models for all temporal terms.
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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
