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- Title
Perspective-Taking and Comprehension of Passive Sentences by Japanese-Speaking Children.
- Authors
Suzuki, Takaaki
- Abstract
This study demonstrates that children's difficulties in the interpretation of passives are attributed to their perspective-taking ability. Thirty-six Japanese preschool children participated in act-out sentence comprehension tasks. They were asked to manipulate two toy animals to demonstrate the meaning of two types of stimulus sentences: Type I had the child's toy, whose reference involved the child's actual name (e.g., Jun-kun no neko “Jun's cat”) encoded as grammatical subject, while Type II had the child's toy encoded as non-subject. Since passive structures take the perspective of the patient-denoting subject NP, it is assumed that only Type I passives have the perspective that matches that of the child. The results show that children's performance on passives was significantly better in Type I than in Type II sentences. But this difference was not observed for active sentences. For those who showed (nearly) perfect performance on active sentences, only Type I passives were equally well understood. These results strongly suggest that perspective-taking difficulties mask children's true competence on passives and that even 6-year-olds may not yet have attained the full perspective-taking ability required for comprehension of passive sentences.
- Subjects
PRESCHOOL children; SENTENCES (Grammar); LANGUAGE acquisition; COGNITION; JAPANESE people; COMPREHENSION
- Publication
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2002, Vol 31, Issue 2, p131
- ISSN
0090-6905
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1023/A:1014974716861