Rights statement: © 2015 The Authors. Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Final published version, 337 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Young children’s comprehension of temporal relations in complex sentences
T2 - the influence of memory on performance
AU - Blything, Liam
AU - Davies, Robert
AU - Cain, Kate
N1 - © 2015 The Authors. Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PY - 2015/11
Y1 - 2015/11
N2 - The present study investigated 3- to 7-year-olds’ (N = 91) comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after. The youngest children used an order of mention strategy to interpret the relation between clauses: They were more accurate when the presentation order matched the chronological order of events: “He ate his lunch, before he played in the garden” (chronological) versus “Before he played in the garden, he ate his lunch” (reverse). Between 4 and 6 years, performance was influenced by a combination of factors that influenced processing load: connective type and presentation order. An independent measure of working memory was predictive of performance. The study concludes that the memory demands of some sentence structures limits young children’s comprehension of sentences containing temporal connectives.
AB - The present study investigated 3- to 7-year-olds’ (N = 91) comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after. The youngest children used an order of mention strategy to interpret the relation between clauses: They were more accurate when the presentation order matched the chronological order of events: “He ate his lunch, before he played in the garden” (chronological) versus “Before he played in the garden, he ate his lunch” (reverse). Between 4 and 6 years, performance was influenced by a combination of factors that influenced processing load: connective type and presentation order. An independent measure of working memory was predictive of performance. The study concludes that the memory demands of some sentence structures limits young children’s comprehension of sentences containing temporal connectives.
U2 - 10.1111/cdev.12412
DO - 10.1111/cdev.12412
M3 - Journal article
VL - 86
SP - 1922
EP - 1934
JO - Child Development
JF - Child Development
SN - 0009-3920
IS - 6
ER -