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Child Development.
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BackwardRepetition,and MatrixPermutation
betweenLanguage and
Relationships
Cognitive Skills: Passive-Voice Comprehension,Backward Repetition, and Matrix Permutation.
CHILD
DEVELOPMENT,
Since Chomsky (1965) posited that humans are innately equipped with a set of possible hypotheses about language structure and
with mechanisms for detecting and matching
grammatical regularities in linguistic input
against these hypotheses, many developmental
psycholinguists (e.g., McNeill 1970) have considered language acquisition and cognitive
development to be independent. The supporting evidence most frequently cited is the contrast between early detection of syntactic rules
and the later emergence, during the concrete
operational stage, of refined skills for generating and testing nonlinguistic hypotheses. However, it has become apparent that knowledge
of many linguistic rules is not complete by
kindergarten (Palermo & Molfese 1972), so the
independence of language from cognitive development may not be as great as has been
supposed.
In syntax, a strong hypothesis on the relation between cognitive and linguistic skills
would be that the acquisition of a particular
logical skill is a prerequisite for the mastery of
a given grammatical construction. The relation
between active and passive sentences should
provide a test of this hypothesis. For example,
in the active sentence, "Ann baked the bread,"
Ann, the first noun, is both semantic agent and
grammatical subject while the second noun,
bread, is both recipient of the action and
grammatical object. This correspondence between word order and the semantic reference
of the subject and predicate nouns is most
typical in English. In contrast, in the semantically equivalent passive sentence, "The bread
was baked by Ann," the order of agent and
the recipient is reversed: the first noun, bread,
is semantically the recipient of the action.
Chomsky's (1965) transformational rules imply
The authors wish to thank Andy Sklar for his help in constructingthe stimuli and in data
analysis, Linda Morrisonfor assistance in data analysis, and Nancy Chambers for assistance in
testing children. Miss Carolyn Zack, of the MontgomeryCounty School System, and Dr. Louise
Berman, of the Center for Young Children, University of Maryland, were very helpful in obtaining subjects. The study was supported by a grant to the Center for Language and Cognition from the Biomedical Science Support Committee of the University of Maryland. Reprint
requests should be sent to Ellin K. Scholnick, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742.
[Child Development,1973, 44, 741-746. @ 1973 by the Society for Researchin Child Development,Inc.
All rightsreserved.]
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Method
Subjects
Children were chosen from three grades,
kindergarten, first, and second. There were 16
males and 16 females at each level with respective average ages of 5.3, 6.3, and 7.4 years. All
subjects spoke English as their native language
and were performing at an age-appropriate
grade level in the suburban Washington, D.C.,
public school which they attended.
Procedure
Passive voice comprehension.-Each child
saw 16 20.3 X 12.7-cm colored cartoons like
those in figure 1. Each cartoon showed an actor
either hiding, painting, washing, or bumping
a recipient in the presence of a third element.
The actor and recipient were either animate or
inanimate. All four actor-recipient combinations occurred. The irrelevant element belonged to the same semantic category as the
recipient. Since so few verbs can be illustrated
clearly with both animate and inanimate actors, verb and actor-recipient combinations
were confounded. The pictures of washing and
painting showed animate actors, while cartoons
of hiding and bumping showed inanimate actors. Animate and inanimate recipients were
evenly distributed across all four verbs. There
were two pictures for each of the eight verb
and actor-recipient combinations so generated.
A different tape-recorded passive sentence
accompanied each cartoon. Nonsense syllables
low in meaningfulness (Glaze 1928) described
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TAJ.
WAS
BUMPED
BYTHE
IA-THEYOP
FIG.
II-THEMX WAS
HIDDEN
BYT~EVUM.
1.-Passive-voice stimuli with accompanying sentences
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Backward repetition.-A
perfect back-
Results
Individual performance was evaluated by
means of a mixed design analysis of variance
followed by Tukey's test of significant differences between appropriate means. Only F ratios and-mean differences significant at p < .05
will be reported. Since sex and task order never
affected scores, these variables were omitted
from the analyses to be reported.
Passive-voicecomprehension.-Errorswere
Matrix permutation.-A
credit
was
TABLE 1
DISTRIBUTIONOF WRONGCHOICESOF THE REFERENTFORNONSENSE SYLLABLESIN
DIFFERENT ACTOR-RECIPIENTCONTEXTS
ACTOR CORRECT
ACTOR-RECIPIENT
COMBINATION
Animate-animate ............
Animate-inanimate ...........
Inanimate-animate...........
Inanimate-inanimate.........
Total ....................
RECIPIENT CORRECT
Extra Object
Choice
Actor
Choice
Extra Object
Choice
0.99
0.96
0.21
0.18
0.88
1.36
0.94
0.95
0.54
0.66
0.94
1.61
0.14
0.14
2.28
2.23
0.38
0.45
2.74
4.08
4.19
1.59
4.44
1.11
11.33
Recipient
Choice
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TOTAL
ERRORS
References
Discussion
The major finding of this study must be
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