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At least 523 records · Page 29Linked to original sources
PubMed2005

Picture naming in 3- to 8-year-old French children: methodological considerations for name agreement.

Picture naming has become an important experimental paradigm in cognitive psychology. Young children are more variable than adults in their naming responses and less likely to know the object or its name. A consequence is that the interpretation of the two classical measures used by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) for scoring name agreement in adults (the percentage of agreement, based on modal name, and the H statistic, based on alternative names) will differ because of the high rate of "don't know object" responses, common in young children, relative to the low rate of "don't know object" responses more characteristic of adults. The present study focused on this methodological issue in young French children (3-8 years old), using a set of 145 Snodgrass-Vanderwart pictures. Our results indicate that the percentage of agreement based on the expected name is a better measure of picture-naming performance than are the commonly used measures. The norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Child↗
PubMed1989

[A study on the development of message-production in the referential communication].

The purpose of this study was to examine the development of message-production in a referential communication paradigm. Children (3-12 years) were asked to mention the associative encodings of two kinds of figures and then verbally communicate the figures to the adult and peer listeners. Differences in content and mode of encoding under the associative and communicative conditions were analyzed. Five-year-olds showed more changes of mode than three-year-olds. As for the changes of content, however, five-year-olds showed less than the others did. It was concluded that in the development of message-production, the changes of mode began to appear simultaneously when the associative encodings of the figures became stable, and afterwards the changes of content appeared. Differences between the messages for the adult and peer listeners were also analyzed.

Adult↗
PubMed1982

Functions of consonant assimilation and reduplication in early word productions of mentally retarded children.

Spontaneous speech samples were elicited from eight mentally retarded children. Examples of consonant assimilation and reduplication found in their speech samples were separately analyzed to examine how these phonological processes function in the phonologies of retarded children. Results showed wide individual variability in subjects' use of consonant assimilation. Reduplication functioned to provide a method by which the subjects whose word productions were primarily monosyllabic could produce multisyllabic targets and/or to provide a method by which the subjects could produce multisyllabic words that had one syllable containing target consonants of consonant clusters absent from their phonetic repertoires.

Child↗
PubMed1993

Development in children's causal theories of their seizure disorders.

Despite the prevalence of seizure disorders in children, little is known about how youngsters with epilepsy understand the cause of their disorder. Fifty children and adolescents with idiopathic seizure disorders, between 5- and 16-years-old, were questioned about the etiology of seizure episodes and of seizure disorders, as well as their understanding of physical causality, general illness causality, and brain functioning. Responses were scored for their conceptual complexity according to scales paralleling Piaget's stages of cognitive development. Older children had more cognitively sophisticated concepts of epilepsy than did younger children. Overall, however, children scored significantly lower on questions about their seizure disorders than on questions assessing their understanding of physical causality, general illness causality, and brain functioning. Many children had misconceptions about seizure disorders and lacked disease-related information; only 41% of the children identified epilepsy as a disease involving the brain. These findings underline the need for including educational intervention in the comprehensive care of pediatric seizure disorders.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

What word learners do when input contradicts the mutual exclusivity assumption.

In 4 studies, 3- to 5-year-olds heard 2 novel English labels each applied to the same novel object by a different adult. In all 4 studies, about half of the children accepted both labels, suggesting that hearing 2 labels applied to an object offers strong enough evidence for some to override mutual exclusivity. Nonetheless, about half of the children honored mutual exclusivity and hence accepted only 1 label; they also seemed to keep both labels in mind for at least a few minutes and settled on whichever label they re-encountered first. This strategy allows children to make an informed choice between 2 apparently equally good labels, without straining their limited memory capacities.

Child Development↗
PubMed1990

Structure and function of baby talk in a day-care centre.

The aim of this study is to examine how caretakers speak to young children in a day-care centre and particularly to investigate how they adjust their language, according to children's age and to size of groups. Five Italian teachers were observed, each one during six different sessions. Children's ages were 0; 10-1; 2 and 2; 6-3; 0. The number of children varied from a rather large group (seven children) to a small group (three children) to a single child. Language was taperecorded during free-play sessions of ten minutes. Context was noted by two observers. Transcripts were analysed according to structural features (syntactical complexity, redundancy, type-token ratio, speed) and functional features (proportion of utterances with different purpose: control and organization of child behaviour, empathy, conversation and teaching). Results show some significant differences in structure and function according to children's age and group size.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1999

Why is colour naming difficult?

A suggestion exists in the child language literature that the meanings of natural kind terms are acquired before the meanings of colour terms. Explanations have typically claimed that object terms are more salient than property terms. Such explanations, however, tend to ignore the fact that natural kind terms refer to categories with sharp, clear boundaries while colour terms refer to categories with unclear or variable boundaries. Nonetheless, there has been little evidence to show that the delay in the acquisition of colour terms arises from these semantic properties. This study compares natural kind and colour naming (and corresponding comprehension) by 48 children, ranging in age from 3;0 to 5;5. The results suggest that, contra the salience view, the apparent delay in colour naming may be explained on solely semantic grounds.

Child Development↗
PubMed1993

Letters as spatial-oriented shapes and/or graphemic signs: a developmental study of left- and right-handed girls during the period of learning to read.

This study is concerned with the problem of hemispheric specialization and/or cooperation in relation to development and manual laterality. The processing of alphabetic signs and its relationship to interhemispheric transfer and functional hemispheric asymmetries were studied by comparing left- and right-handed girls during acquisition of reading. The children perform matching tasks with letters having different orientations and with meaningless forms having the same orientations as the letters. Each subject performed the matching under three conditions: right/left intermanual transfer, left/right intermanual transfer, and dichaptic exploration. Results indicate: (1) A differentiated development between the two handednesses. (2) The functional lateralization change was different for left- and right-handed girls, a greater effect of the ability to identify the letter on matching tasks was observed for the right-handed children than for the left-handed children. These last results are discussed with regard to inter-hemispheric transfer and functional hemispheric asymmetry changes. We hypothesized a strategy difference between left- and right-handed girls and a difference in their ability to change their cognitive strategy (left-handers continue to favor a spatial coding with letters).

Brain↗
PubMed1993

Children's understanding of the relation between referential knowledge and referential behavior.

Young children often confuse what is said and meant in referential communication. This study determines exactly what is confused by kindergarten children, second graders, and fourth graders. In each of four experiments, a story listener's referential knowledge variously came from object details in the context and in an utterance, and children were asked independently to judge knowledge sufficiency for identifying one referent in a display, and whether the knowledge came from the utterance alone. In Experiments 1 and 2, experimenter identification of the correct referent was manipulated to determine if children confuse internal representations of information knowledge and referential behavior, or behavior and the real world referent, in determining the listerner's knowledge. In other experiments, the consistency of referential behavior with the correct referent was manipulated to determine the basis of children's knowledge assessments. Overall the results show that children's say-mean confusion varies depending on situational factors and variably reflects children's use of internal representations and external referential behavior in assessing knowledge.

Child↗
PubMed1979

Pragmatics and elicited imitation: children's performance on discursively related and discursively unrelated sentences.

Two experiments were conducted to determine the elicited imitation performance of preschool children when the stimulus sentences were meaningfully related to each other in a story as compared to when the sentences were arranged in a random order. Experiment 1 used a repeated-measures design and found a practice effect demonstrating less errors during the second trial regardless of experimental condition. Experiment 2 implemented a group design with one group imitating the related (story) sentences and the other imitating the randomly arranged sentences. The results showed no significant difference in the mean number of errors occurring in the "story" versus the "random" condition. The implications of the practice effect found in Experiment 1 are discussed and the error pattern during the second trial is evaluated. The efficacy of using discursively related as opposed to unrelated sentences in elicited imitation tasks is discussed from a pragmatic point of view.

Child Language↗