Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T04:07:29.593Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Some developmental aspects of sentence processing and memory*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Lorraine K. Tyler  and
William Marslen-Wilson
Lorraine K. Tyler
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
William Marslen-Wilson
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Three groups of children, aged 5, 7 and 11 years, were tested in a clause-memory task, in order to investigate the role of syntactic and semantic factors in children's recall and processing of spoken continuous prose. The children listened to a story, which was interrupted at intervals during which they were asked to repeat verbatim the last sentence they heard. The test-sentences always consisted of two clauses: either of the main–main type, or of the main–subordinate or subordinate–main types. The prose material was also either normal prose, or semantically uninterpretable but syntactically normal prose. The results suggest a developmental sequence in which the youngest group's performance is dominated by semantic factors. They do not show the adult clause-memory effects, their recall is dominated by the main clause, and their recall of normal prose is not clausally segmented. The two older groups' performance more closely approximates that of adults.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , February 1978 , pp. 113 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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

[*]

This research was supported by a grant to W. Marslen-Wilson from the Spencer Foundation. We thank the principals and staff of the University of Chicago Laboratory School and of the Ancona School for their cooperation. Address for correspondence: Max-Plank-Gesellschaft, ProjektGruppe für Psycholinguistik, Berg en Dalseweg 79, Nijmegen, Holland.

References

REFERENCES

Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, J. R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. (1969). Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Cited in Clark, E. (1970). How young children describe events in time. In D'Arcais, G. B. Flores & Levelt, W. J. M. (eds), Advances in psycholinguistics. Amsterdam and New York: American Elsevier.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1973). The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: a critique of language statistics in psychological research. JVLVB 12. 335–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flavell, J. H. (1970). Developmental studies of mediated memory. In Reese, H. W. & Lipsitt, L. P. (eds), Advances in child development and behavior, Vol. 5. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Finn, J. D. (1972). Multivariance: univariate and multivariate analysis of variance and regression. Ann Arbor, Mich.: National Educational Resources.Google Scholar
Fodor, J. A., Bever, T. G. & Garrett, M. F. (1974). The psychology of language. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Green, D. W. (1975). The effects of task on the representation of sentences. JVLVB 14. 275–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttenlocher, J. & Burke, D. (1976). Why does memory span increase with age? CogPsych. 8, 1–32.Google Scholar
Jarvella, R. J. (1971). Syntactic processing of connected speech. JVLVB 10. 409–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lahey, B. (1972). The role of prosody and syntactic markers in children's comprehension of spoken sentences. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1973). Linguistic structure and speech shadowing at very short latencies. Nature 244. 522–3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1975). Sentence perception as an interactive parallel process. Science 189. 226–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. & Tyler, L. K. (1975). Processing structure of sentence perception. Nature 257. 784–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1976). Memory and levels of processing in a psycholinguistic context. JExpPsych: HLM 2. 112–19.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., Tyler, L. K. & Seidenberg, M. (1976). The semantic control of clausal segmentation. Paper presented at Midwestern Psychological Association meetings,Chicago.Google Scholar
McNeill, D. (1970). The acquisition of language: the study of developmental psycholinguistics. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Wells, G. (1974). Learning to code experience through language. JChLang 1. 243–69.Google Scholar