ERIC Number: ED061781
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1969-Jan-1
Pages: 23
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
The Five-Year-Old's Comprehension of Expanded and Transformed Conjoined Sentences.
Hatch, Evelyn; And Others
The present study explores accuracy and speed of responses by the five-year-old child to expanded and conjoined sentences. The following factors were considered: (a) number of transformations, (b) types of transformations, (c) auxiliary-type sentence expansion and (d) type of query (those designed to elicit responses which should reflect comprehension of syntax versus those designed to elicit responses which should reflect comprehension of sentence meaning). Subjects were kindergartners from the American English speech community of Los Angeles. Since psycholinguistic literature suggested that number of transformations might reflect comprehension difficulty, the conjoined sentences used in the experiment were arranged according to the number of operations or transformations they exhibited. Results of the experiment showed, however, that number of transformations was not a useful predictor of the speed or accuracy of the child's responses to the types of sentences used. Sentence expansion was also not considered significant. Transformation type seemed to be pertinent to locating problem areas of difficulty in sentence comprehension, but it was not clear to what extent generalizations regarding this factor could be drawn from the data derived from the present study. This document was previously announced as ED 043 002. (Author/FWB)
Publication Type: N/A
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: N/A
Sponsor: Office of Education (DHEW), Washington, DC.
Authoring Institution: Southwest Regional Educational Lab., Inglewood, CA.
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A