Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T19:00:31.030Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Actionality and mental imagery in children's comprehension of declaratives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Jean-Pierre Thibaut ,
Jean A. Rondal  and
Anne-Marie KÄens
Jean-Pierre Thibaut*
Affiliation:
University of Liège
Jean A. Rondal
Affiliation:
University of Liège
Anne-Marie KÄens
Affiliation:
University of Liège
*
Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique, University of Liège, B32, Sart-Tilman, 4000-Liège, Belgium.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Previous work bas demonstrated that children understand sentences with actional verbs better than nonactional verbs. This ACTIONALITY EFFECT bas been reportee to be restricted to passives and to be independent of experimental context. The present experiment was conducted with 48 French-speaking children aged 5;0–7;11. The actionality effect was studied by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. Pictures corresponding or not to the predicate—argument structure of the sentences were presented to the subjects, who were independently classified as visualizers or nonvisualizers, in order to investigate the relation between sentence actionality and mental imagery. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depends on the type of task used in order to assess comprehension, and that it can be reversed in some conditions. Our results also suggest that the actionality effect is linked to mental imagery. Visualizers demonstrated better comprehension of actional sentences than nonvisualizers, whereas the reverse was true for nonactional sentences. Mental image may serve as a support for the computations involved in sentence comprehension.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 189 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

We are grateful to Michael Beveridge, Robert Hoffmeister and Alan Richardson-Klavehn for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

REFERENCES

Baddeley, A. (1990). Human memory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bever, T. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, J. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Bower, G. H. (1972). Mental imagery and associative learning. In Gregg, L. W. (ed.), Cognition in learning and memory. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dean, A. (1990). The development of mental imagery: a comparison of Piagetian and cognitive psychological perspectives. Annals of Child Development 7, 105–44.Google Scholar
Denis, M. (1979). Les images mentales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denis, M. (1989). Image et cognition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Glass, A. L., Millen, D. R., Beck, L. G. & Eddy, J. K. (1985). Representation of images in sentence verification. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 24, 442–65.Google Scholar
Gordon, P. & Chafetz, J. (1990). Verb-based versus class-based accounts of actionality effects in children's comprehension of passives. Cognition 36, 227–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hopper, P. & Thompson, S. (1980). Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56, 251–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hupet, M. & Le Bouedec, B. (1975). Definiteness and voice in the interpretation of active and passive sentences. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 27, 323–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lempert, H. & Kinsbourne, M. (1981). How young children represent sentences: evidence from the superiority of noun recall from action as compared to stative sequences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 10, 155–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. (1973). The effect of stress on the understanding of pronominal coreference in children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 3, 65–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. & Abramovitch, R. (1975). How children understand full, truncated and anomalous passives. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 14, 145–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M., Kuczaj, S. A., Fox, D. C. & Chalkley, M. (1979). Some empirical issues in the acquisition of transformational relations. In Collins, W. A. (ed.), Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology. Vol. 12. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M., Fox, D., Becker, J. & Chalkley, M. (1985). Semantic restrictions on children's passives. Cognition 19, 167–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paivio, A. (1986). Mental representations: a dual coding approach. New York: O. U. P.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., Lebeaux, D. & Frost, L. A. (1987). Productivity and constraints in the acquisition of the passive. Cognition 26, 195–267.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rondal, J. A. & Thibaut, J. P. (1992). Facteurs de transitivité sémantique dans la compréhension et la production des déclaratives chez l'enfant. Glossa 29, 26–34.Google Scholar
Rondal, J. A., Thibaut, J. P., Cession, A., Brédart, S. & Kaens, A. M. (1988). Semantic and syntactic factors in children's comprehension of passives. Applied Linguistics Papers 12, 79–102.Google Scholar
Rondal, J. A., Thibaut, J. P. & Cession, A. (1990). Transitivity effects on children's sentence comprehension. European Bulletin of Cognitive Psychology 10, 385–400.Google Scholar
Searle, S. D. (1987). Linear models for unbalanced data. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Shepard, R. & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science 171, 701–3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sinclair, H. & Ferreiro, E. (1970). Etude génétique de la compréhension, production et répétition des phrases au mode passif. Archives de Psychologie 38, 1–40.Google Scholar
Sudhalter, V. & Braine, M. (1985). How does comprehension of passives develop? A comparison of actional and experiential verbs. Journal of Child Language 12, 455–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thibaut, J. P. (1993). Le traitement des verbes d'action et mentaux dans les phrases avec proposition relative: réversibilité et complexité syntaxique. Archives de Psychologie 61, 265–79.Google Scholar
Vion, M. & Amy, G. (1984). Comprendre les relations agent-patient dans les énoncés simples en français. Archives de Psychologie 52, 209–29.Google Scholar