The use of adult cues to test the language competence of young children
- 1 April 1975
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Journal of Child Language
- Vol. 2 (1) , 105-124
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s030500090000091x
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.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
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- On the child's acquisition of antonyms in two semantic fieldsJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1972
- Control of grammar in imitation, comprehension, and productionJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1963