Recent research in social cognition and discourse has led to a reexamina
tion of how young children interpret instructions in language compre
hension tests. This paper reviews some of the ways in which test presenta
tion can influence children's understanding of what is being talked about
and what they are being asked to do.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Bridges, A.1980: SVO comprehension strategies reconsidered: the evidence of individual patterns of response. Journal of Child Language7, 89-104.
2.
Campbell, R.N. and Bowe, T.1977: Functional asymmetry in early language understanding . In Donaldson, M., Grieve, R. and Pratt, C. , editors, Early childhood development and education, Oxford: Blackwell.
3.
Freeman, N.H., Sinha, C.G. and Condliffe, S.G.1981: Collaboration and confrontation with young children in language comprehension testing. In Robinson, W. P., editor, Communication in development, London: Academic Press.
4.
Freeman, N.H., Sinha, C.G. and Stedmon, J.A.1982: All the cars-which cars? From word-meaning to discourse analysis. In Beveridge, M., editor, Children thinking through language, London: Edward Arnold.
5.
Grieve, R. and Stanley, S.1984: Less obscure? Pragmatics and 3-4-year-old children's semantics . British Journal of Developmental Psychology2, 95-104.
6.
Hoogenraad, R., Grieve, R., Baldwin, P. and Campbell, R.1977: Comprehension as an interactive process. In Campbell, R. N. and Smith, P. T., editors, Recent advances in the psychology of language, Volume 1, Language development and mother-child interaction, London: Plenum Press.
7.
Hughes, M. and Grieve, R.1983: On asking children bizarre questions. In Donaldson, M., Grieve, R. and Pratt, C., editors, Early childhood development and education, Oxford: Blackwell.
8.
Light, P.H., Buckingham, N. and Robbins, A.1979: The conversation task as an interactional setting . British Journal of Educational Psychology49, 304-310.
9.
Luszcz, M.A. and Bacharach, V.R.1983: The emergence of communicative competence: detection of conversational topics. Journal of Child Language10, 623-637.
10.
McGarrigle, J. and Donaldson, M.1976: Conservation accidents. Cognition3, 341-350.
11.
Neilson, I., Dockrell, J. and McKechnie, J.1983: Does repetition of the question influence children's performance in conservation tasks?British Journal of Developmental Psychology1, 163-174.
12.
Strohner, H. and Nelson, K.E.1974: The young child's development of sentence comprehension: influence of event probability, nonverbal context, syntactic form, and strategies . Child Development45, 567-576.
13.
Walkerdine, V. and Sinha, C.1978: The internal triangle: language, reasoning, and the social context. In Markova, I., editor, The social context of language, London : Wiley.
14.
Wilcox, S. and Palermo, D.S.1982: Children's use of lexical and non-lexical information in responding to commands. Journal of Child Language9, 139-150.
