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The use of adult cues to test the language competence of young children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Betty Hart
Betty Hart
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
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Abstract

It was hypothesized that if young children could be taught the verbal cues used to elicit syntactic constructions from adults, children could respond just as adults do in terms of language performance. A series of stories was used to teach six 4- to 5-year-old children to identify objects as ‘nouns’, attributes of objects as ‘adjectives’, and actions as ‘verbs’. These form-class labels were then used as cues to request production of ANV (adjective-noun-verb) and ANVAN (adjective-noun-verb-adjective-noun) sentences. Though no child had produced this descriptive form during the pre-test, all children used such sentences in describing five post-test stories; responses in a control group showed that ANVAN sentences would not have been produced by prompting more elaborate description of the stories. All six children appeared to have well-formed semantic fields for nouns, adjectives and verbs.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , April 1975 , pp. 105 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

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