Understanding sentences in contexts: Some developmental studies

Abstract

A first experiment examined in detail the within-sentence semantic factors controlling young children's immediate recall. Dutch children (10 5-year-olds & 10 7-year-olds) were asked to repeat the last sentence heard of a story. Sentences were two-claused & varied in their internal semantic cohesiveness. A second experiment examined the role of the informational relationship between the sentence & the discourse context in which it occurs. A clause memory task similar to experiment 1 was administered to 20 5-year-old & 20 7-year-old English children. Test sentences were classified according to their textual cohesiveness, while still controlling their internal cohesiveness. Analyzed are integration errors, first clause omissions, & meaning-changing errors. The basic skill considered is the interpretation of utterances in their contexts. Both an increase in "capacity" & in "processing" skills seem to be developing. This allows older children to process textually more demanding inputs rapidly, & to retain longer in memory certain information concerning the intermediate stages of the interpretation process. Younger children are forced by their less developed capacities to move as quickly as possible to the functionally basic goal of normal listening. A move further back in the developmental sequence would probably show increasing dominance of context-based interpretive functions, & less control over the putative syntactic & semantic subcomponents of these processes. 6 Tables, 3 Figures. A. Sbragia