Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Children's choice of attribute-order in verbal descriptions of objects and in response to different orders of modifiers was studied. Two types of tasks were examined: production and comprehension. Children were asked to label eight blocks which differed in one value of one attribute and to discriminate the one block of a set of four described to them in one of the six possible orders of color, size, and material. Latency scores were recorded by the child's pushing a switch in front of the block he would choose. The two production tasks were designated as the verbal description of the objects before (P₁) and after (P₂) the comprehension task. Comprehension (C) was determined by latency of response to the oral instructions in the visual discimination task. Eighteen children, ages 4 through 7, participated, each serving as his own control and performing the three tasks. The results showed sex differences in the comprehension task: the boys responded faster to the second most common order in English (color, size, material) while the girls responded faster to the most common order (size, color, material).

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Braine, M. : The ontogeny of English phrase structure: the first phase. Language, 1963, 39, 1-13.

Brown, R. : “How shall a thing be called?” 1958.

Brown, R. : “How shall a thing be called?” Psychological Review, 1958, 65, 14-21.

Di Vesta, F.J., Norms for modifiers used by children in a restricted word-association task, Child Development, 1965, 27, 32-28.

Fraser, C., Bellugi, Ursula , and Brown, R. : Control of grammar in imitation, comprehension, and production, J. Verbal Lang. & Verbal Behavior, 1963, 2, 121-135.

Greenberg, J. H. : Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In: J. H. Greenberg, (Ed.), Universais of Language, Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1963.

Hays, William L. : Statistics for Psychologists. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963.

Huttenlocher, Janellen : Children's language: word-phrase relationnships”, Science, 1964, 143, 264-265.

Lack, Agnes : The Teaching of Language to Deaf Children, London: Oxford Univ. Press; 1955.

10.

Maclay, H. : Linguistics and language behavior, J. Comm., 1964, 14, 66-73.

11.

McCarthy, Dorothea : Language development. In: L. Carmichael (Ed.), Manual of Child Psychology (2nd ed.) New York: John Wiley, 1954.

12.

Osgood, C. E. : Understanding and creating sentences. Address to Amer. Psychol. Assn., 1963.

13.

Praninskas, Jean : Rapid Review of English Grammar For Students of English as a Second Language, Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957.

14.

Zeaman, D. , and House, Betty : The role of attention in retardate discrimination learning. In Ellis, N., (Ed.), Handbook of Mental Deficiency, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.

Childrens' Understanding of Constraints upon Adjective Order

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References