Natural languages distinguish between telic predicates that denote events leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g., "draw a balloon") and atelic predicates that denote events with no inherent endpoint (e.g., "draw balloons"). Telicity distinctions in many languages are already partly available to 4-5-year-olds. Here, using…

Aspect markers (AMs), temporal adverbs (TAs) and temporal nouns (TNs) are used by young Mandarin-speaking children to express time. However, the factors that affect the relative acquisition trajectories of these categories remains unclear. Accordingly, this study adopts Weist's time-concept model to examine the patterns of acquisition between and…

Time adverbs are represented by words or phrases more than morphemes in Turkish. Many studies in the literature have revealed that the frequency of the usage of adverbs of time is higher than the frequency of the usage of other adverbs by Turkish speakers of all ages. In this study, by using path/connection analysis method, the usage frequency of…

The authors investigated normative beliefs about personality development. Young, middle-aged, and older adults indicated the age-relevance of 835 French adjectives by specifying person characteristics as typical for any age decade from 0 to 99 years. With this paradigm, the authors determined age-relevance (How typical is a characteristic for a…

This study sought to test the most efficient representation mode with which children with hearing impairment could express a story while producing connectives indicating relations of time and of cause and effect. Using Bruner's (1973, 1986, 1990) representation stages, we tested the comparative effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) as a mode of…

Multiclause sentences with the temporal adverbs "while" or "when" referring to simultaneous events (e.g., "While [when] John was writing a letter, Mary comes into the room") were compared in German and Spanish. Following Talmy (2001), we assumed that the event in the main clause is the figure (F; the event to be located in time), and the event in…

The purpose of the study was to investigate children's understanding of "before" and "after" in temporal directions, in temporal questions, and in pictorial events through the use of three interview methods. The subjects for the study were 62 children, ranging in age from 40 to 80 months, enrolled in a half-day, private nursery/kindergarten…

In order to gain information on children's understanding of two different language forms (verb tense and adverbials "before" and "after") which can refer to past or future events, sentences containing either past tense, future tense, "before," or "after" were presented with sets of sequential pictures to 150 children from three to seven years old.…

Reviews some history of how lexical representations have acquired an important role in sentence processing research. Discusses relevant issues, including the importance of timecourse information in theorizing; the importance of frequency information in theories of sentence processing; and the question of the grain of frequency information. (42…

This study examines children's understanding of temporal markers and explores a strategy for teaching such understanding when it is absent. The original sample for this study consisted of 22 first graders and 85 kindergarten children. All subjects were individually pretested with the Temporal Marker Test (TMT) which evaluates performance on eight…