The effect of intonational emphasis on the sentence comprehension of severely subnormal and normal pre-school children was investigated by stressing the critical elements of sentences of varying syntactic structure. The results concurred with previous work insofar as intonational emphasis did not facilitate comprehension. There was, however, some evidence to show that intonational emphasis may have a detrimental effect on the subnormal child's comprehension of negative structures.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Amidon, A. and Carey, P. ( 1972). Why five year olds cannot understand before and after . J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 11, 417.
2.
Argyle, M. ( 1969). Social Interaction (London ).
3.
Argyle, M. ( 1972a). The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth).
4.
Argyle, M. ( 1972b). Non-verbal communication in human social interaction . In R. A. Hinde. (ed.), Non-verbal Communication (Cambridge).
5.
Berko, J. ( 1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150.
6.
Bolinger, D. (1964). Around the edge of language: intonation. Harvard Educ. Rev., 34, 282. In D. Bolinger (ed.) (1973), Intonation (Harmondsworth).
7.
Brimer, M.A. and Dunn, L.M. ( 1962). English Picture Vocabulary Tests ( Bristol).
8.
Brown, R. ( 1965). Language: the system and its acquisition. In Social Psychology (London).
9.
Chomsky, N. ( 1971). Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation . In D. D. Steinberg and L. A. Jakobovitz (eds.), Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology (Cambridge ).
10.
Crystal, D. ( 1969). Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English ( Cambridge).
11.
Frith, U. ( 1969). Emphasis and meaning in recall in normal and autistic children. Language and Speech, 12, 29.
12.
Fry, D.B. ( 1955). Duration and intensity as physical correlates of linguistic stress. J. acoust. Soc. Amer., 27, 765.
13.
Fry, D.B. ( 1958). Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech, 1, 126.
14.
Fry, D.B. ( 1964). The dependence of stress judgements on vowel formant structure. Proc. 5th Int. Congr. Phon. Sci ( Basel), 306.
15.
Hermelin, B. and O'Connor, N. ( 1970). Psychological Experiments with Autistic Children ( Oxford).
16.
Herriot, P. ( 1970). An Introduction to the Psychology of Language ( London).
17.
Herriot, P. and Lunzer, E.A. ( 1971). Comprehension and cognitive development. Paper presented to conference on " Language Comprehension and the Acquisition of Knowledge ", Quail Roost Conference Centre, North Carolina.
18.
Hobsbaum, A. and Mittler, P. ( 1971). Sentence Comprehension Test (experimental edition) . Hester Adrian Research Centre, University of Manchester .
19.
Maratsos, M.P. ( 1973). The effects of stress on the understanding of pronominal co-reference in children. J. psycholing. Res., 2, 1.
20.
Martin, E. and Roberts, K.H. ( 1966). Grammatical factors in sentence retention. J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 5, 211.
21.
Mcclean, M.D. and Tiffany, W.R. ( 1973). The acoustic parameters of stress in relation to syllable position, speech loudness and rate. Language and Speech, 16, 283.
22.
Mittler, P., Jeffree, D.M., Wheldall, K. and Berry, P. ( 1971). Assessment and Remediation of Language Comprehension and Production in Severely Subnormal Children. Second progress report to Social Science Research Council (unpublished).
23.
Mittler, P., Jeffree, D.M., Wheldall, K. and Berry, P. ( 1974). Assessment and Remediation of Language Comprehension and Production in Severely Subnormal Children. Final report to Social Science Research Council (unpublished).
24.
Mittler, P. and Wheldall, K. ( 1971). Language comprehension in the severely subnormal . Bull. Brit. Psychol. Soc., 24, 227 (abstract). Paper presented to the British Psychological Society, Exeter, April 1971.
25.
Shepard, W. and Ascher, L.M. ( 1973). Effects of linguistic rule conformity on free recall in children and adults. Developm. Psychol., 8, 139.
26.
Weener, P. ( 1971). Language structure and the free recall of verbal messages by children. Developm. Psychol,. 5, 237.
27.
Yngve, V. ( 1960). A model and an hypothesis for language structure . Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc, 104., 444.
