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Syntactic and semantic factors in the acquisition of before and after*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Pamela L. Coker
Pamela L. Coker
Affiliation:
Southwest Regional Laboratory, Los Alamitos California
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Abstract

Sixty kindergartners and sixty first graders were given three tasks to test their comprehension of the terms before and after. The results show that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. When the child does not know the meaning of a temporal term, he frequently interprets it as meaning the next-event-in-time. There are two strategies (main-clause-first and order-of-mention) that the child may adopt when interpreting temporal terms used as subordinating conjunctions. The use of these strategies appears to be independent of the child's knowledge of the meanings of the terms. Contrary to previous research, it was found that before does not seem to be learned before after nor does there appear to be any stage where after is treated to mean before.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 261 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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Footnotes

[*]

Most of this research was conducted at the Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development and was performed pursuant to Contract NE-C-00-3-0064 with theNational Institute of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This research is part of the author's doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1975, under the supervision of Kenneth Wexler. A version of this paper was presented at the 7th Annual Child Language Research Forum, Stanford, April 1975. Thanks are due to David Bessemer, James Coots, Peter Culicover, Bonita Ford, Rochel Gelman, Stanley Legum, William Watt, and Kenneth Wexler for their helpful suggestions throughout all aspects of this research. Additionally, I am most grateful to Mr Guy Carozzo, Principal of Boos Elementary School, for his cooperation in making subjects available. Author's address: Faculty in Psychology, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California 91711.

References

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