on children's comprehension of synonymous sentences

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)

On Children's Comprehension of Synonymous SentencesAuthor(s): Eugene GreenSource: TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Sep., 1969), pp. 189-195Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3585827 .

Accessed: 21/06/2014 04:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to TESOL Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.104 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 04:42:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

On Children's Comprehension of

Synonymous Sentences Eugene Green

Tests of language comprehension usually include very simple tasks: for example, subjects may be asked to respond to commands, to select pictures which correspond to relations expressed in sentences, and to respond to questions with yes/no answers. There is often also a crossing over from one sensory modality to another in these tests. Thus to select a picture that

correctly depicts the sentence The girl showed the cat the dog, a child brings into play both auditory and visual modalities as well as motor activ- ity. Though these tests, along with sentence imitation, have been very useful in studies by Fraser, Bellugi, and Brown and by Paula Menyuk, they frequently impose constraints on the sentences that can be tested.1 Obvi- ously one has to use picturable relations in tests incorporating visual stimuli; commands, by their very nature, impose strong constraints on the kinds of sentences that may be used. Imitation permits greater variety in sentence structure than the other tests, but it is in itself no certain test of under- standing. It is, after all, possible to mimic nonsense. Despite these limita- tions, however, students of language development have been quite successful in using tests like these to demonstrate that children, even before entering first grade, understand the basic system of language.

Yet generative grammar implies much more about man's comprehension of language than what these tasks, in themselves, can reveal. Imitating, obeying simple commands, selecting pictures, and answering yes/no ques- tions generally permit us to explore only partially the strong linkages between understanding and transformational processes. One instance of a problem in comprehension that these tasks leave untouched and that this study investigates is the development in children of a sense that sentences may mean the same thing though they differ somewhat in grammatical style. In other words, the differences between synonymous sentences may be due only to the optional transformations that are used to derive their manifest forms. For example, the sentence The girl showed the cat the dog may

* This paper was presented at the annual conference of the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs, May 1969.

This study was supported by research grant NB 06209 from the National Institutes of Health, United States Public Health Service, to the Boston University Aphasia Research Center.

Eugene Green, Associate Professor and Research Associate, Boston University, and the Aphasia Unit, Boston Veterans Administration Hospital, has published in Language and Speech.

1 C. Fraser, U. Bellugi, and R. Brown, "Control of grammar in imitation, com- prehension, and production," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2 (1963), 121-135. Paula Menyuk, "Alternation of rules in children's grammar," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 3 (1964), 480-488.

189

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.104 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 04:42:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TESOL QUARTERLY

also be expressed as The girl showed the dog to the cat, and the only difference between the two sentences is in the choice of an optional indirect object transformation. Notice that the problem is not concerned with the child's comprehension of either sentence, taken one at a time. A six-year-old can readily give a correct answer to the question "Did the girl show the cat the dog?" and thus show that he understands the relations between indirect and direct objects, that he recognizes the sentence as a question, and that he thus grasps implicitly the transformations involved. Yet the evidence so far examined also demonstrates that six-year-olds fail to see the correspon- dence between the first two sentences above and their difference in meaning from the sentence The girl showed the cat to the dog.

In short, the six-year-old child can answer questions about each of these direct-indirect object sentences; he can point to pictures depicting the rela- tions in them; yet put all three together, and he cannot choose the matching pair. He has not yet learned to identify and separate out the synonymous sentences that differ only in one respect. This task of identifying and sepa- rating sentences through an implicit analysis of their transformations re- quires an analytic ability that develops gradually in children. It is an aspect of linguistic competence that invites investigation.

These differences in the knowledge of sentences may be immediately clear to teachers of foreign languages. Consider the differences between loose and literal translations. In a loose translation one centers, of course, on the meaning of the message and chooses to translate it with whatever structures are colloquial or otherwise appropriate in the target language. In a literal translation, one tries to respect both the meaning and the structure of the original sentences. The problem that we are defining may thus be viewed as a study in the child's developing ability to appreciate literal translations. Obviously, it is a big step from comprehending sentences in one's own language to comprehending sentences in two languages that are both syn- onymous and very similar in structure. For a monolingual learning a second language, the ability to translate literally would appear to presuppose an understanding in one's own language of synonymous sentences that are trans- formational variants of each other. A question that we leave open but which is fascinating is whether the fully bilingual child appreciates synonymous sentences between languages as well as he appreciates structural variants of synonymous sentences in one of them.

The three test sentences cited above help to exemplify the method used to determine children's comprehension of transformational variants; they were grouped together in this way:

The girl showed the cat the dog. A. The girl showed the dog to the cat. B. The girl showed the cat to the dog.

The children were asked to listen to the three sentences at one time and then to decide whether sentence A or sentence B means the same thing as the

190

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.104 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 04:42:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

COMPREHENSION OF SYNONYMOUS SENTENCES

first sentence. The sentences were read in order as listed and they were read carefully and fairly slowly. The aim was to help the child succeed in making a correct choice. The children could request rereadings of the sen- tences, as many as they needed in order to decide. In all, there were forty- nine groups of test sentences, and the task for most children took no more than fifteen minutes.

The sentences themselves are from three to eleven words long, but their length proved unimportant. Nearly every child was able to select the correct match from the two longest groups of sentences in the battery. The words in all the sentences are familiar; in one sentence which does not figure in the results reported here, the noun phrase player piano occurs; a seven-year-old indicated that though he had never heard it before, he could readily imagine what it meant. He asked whether the phrase referred to an "electric" piano. Most important, the sentences are derived with trans- formations which five- and six-year-olds readily comprehend.

Of the transformations tested, this study reports findings on six types. These include:

1. The indirect object transformation (already exemplified) 2. Transformations related to mood: interrogative, imperative, and de-

clarative sentences a. Was she able to find the address?

A. She could find the address. B. Could she find the address?

b. The children of the school pass by. A. Pass the school children by. B. The school children pass by.

3. Transformations related to voice: active and passive sentences The car was hit by the bus from behind.

A. The bus hit the car from behind. B. The car hit the bus from behind.

4. Transformations related to adjectives The man who was tired became busy.

A. The busy man became tired. B. The tired man became busy.

5. Transformations related to synthetic and analytic genitive patterns He is a cousin of our friend.

A. He is our cousin's friend. B. He is our friend's cousin.

6. Transformations related to pronominal substitutions They brought Sally flowers.

A. They brought her flowers. B. They brought him flowers.

191

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.104 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 04:42:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TESOL QUARTERLY

All the sentences in each group make sense; there was no opportunity, except perhaps for the phrase player piano, to reject a sentence because it was meaningless. As for the kinds of transformations tested, diversity was necessary at the outset, simply because there was nothing to show whether children can judge different structures equally well, and, if not, whether there is a scale of difficulty dependent both on the transformational processes involved and on the child's age.

So far, twenty-five children, six girls and nineteen boys, from five through nine years old have been tested; all are from middle income homes; at least one parent in each family is a college graduate. The attitude of the children varied with age: the five- and six-year-olds grew restive and had to be coaxed along; seven- and eight-year-olds found it an exciting challenge; the nine-year-olds were bored. These attitudes, as the results will show, are a good index of the children's performance. Only one six-year-old could not finish the test. Of the others, all but three children understood the require- ments of the test, and, after one or two trials, caught on to the "trick." The presentation of the groups of sentences was varied to guard against biased scores attributable to initial learning. The three children who performed poorly on the test include one six-, one seven-, and one eight-year-old. The eight-year-old, incidentally, realized that she must have missed many items and asked to be retested; four days later she tried again, but with the same results.

From a psychological point of view, the test is one of auditory com- prehension, a mode of language processing which implies that the auditory centers of the cortex have mechanisms for the retention, matching, and com- prehension of sentences. The use of three sentences for matching is prefer- able to two. Though two sentences require a child to retain less material, they also provide less context and apparently invite doubts about the exact- ness of fit. Asked to decide whether two sentences mean the same thing or not, a child may reasonably entertain the possibility that there may be circumstances and variables unaccounted for. And, in fact, children perform more poorly with two sentences at a time than with three. The uncertainty is most striking in sentences involving pronoun substitutions.

Table 1 is a statement of results. The number and age of the children are listed across the top; the transformations tested are specified in the left hand column. The groups of sentences preceded by a number indicate the opportunities each child had to select synonymous sentences for each gram- matical problem. The numbers in the rows after the words right and wrong summarize the success the children of each age group had; for example, in the test for indirect object and direct object, there were four groups of sentences tested; the seven five-year-old children judged them correctly in nine instances and were wrong nineteen times.

The major conclusion that these results point to is that the ability to match equivalent structures is progressively developed, stretching over a period of four to five years; clearly, there is a scale of difficulty. To begin

192

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.104 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 04:42:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

COMPREHENSION OF SYNONYMOUS SENTENCES

TABLE 1. AUDITORY COMPiiuiNSION OF SENTENCE PATTERNS

Age: 5-7 7 8 9+ Number: 7 8 6 4

Transformation 1. Object and Indirect Object Right: 9 6 9 9'

(4 groups of sentences) Wrong: 19 26 15 8 2. Imperatives and Questions Right: 25 34 28 19

(5 groups of sentences) Wrong: 10 6 2 1 3. Passive and Active Right: 5 11 6 7

(2 groups of sentences) Wrong: 9 5 6 1 4. Adjectival Modification Right: 28 37 29 26b

(7 groups of sentences) Wrong: 21 19 13 2 5. Genitive Structures Right: 4 11 7 7

(2 groups of sentences) Wrong: 10 5 5 1 6. Pronoun Substitution Right: 51 66 42 35

(9 groups of sentences) Wrong: 12 6 12 1

a Mann Whitney U Test for significant change in sentences with adjectival modification between ages 7 and 8: p = .030.

bMann Whitney U Test for significant change in sentences with direct and indirect objects between ages 6 and 7: p = .091.

with, even the youngest children recognize pronominal substitutions and, also, differences in the moods of sentences. One interesting aspect of match- ing sentences with pronominal substitutions is indicated by this group of sentences:

He and I watched television. A. We watched television. B. They watched television.

Curiously enough, the selection of "they" rather than "we" accounts for one third of the errors in this group of sentences. Apparently, some children in all age groups do not appreciate the exclusive use of "we," at least in a test situation. That is, hearing the word "we" addressed to them in a sentence, they are tempted to include themselves within the scope of the pronoun; but since they are not included as one of those watching tele- vision-as listeners to the test items they cannot count themselves as "he" or "I"-they reject "we" for "they" and so make an incorrect match.

Seven-year-olds outdo the younger children in matching sentences in the active and passive voice and in matching, also, analytic and synthetic forms of the genitive. One implication of their higher score is that transformations requiring the reversal of word order are more difficult to grasp than either intonation patterns signalling different sentence moods or substitution pat- terns established between pronouns and thir referents.

Though each age group obtains a score of better than half-right for adjectival modifiers, the performance of seven-year-olds is again significantly superior to that of the youngest children. Notice that here again the reversal of word order is an important factor, although not as critical as it is for geni- tives and the passive voice. What would seem to make the genitive relations

193

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.104 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 04:42:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TESOL QUARTERLY

more difficult, as the example above (under 5) indicates, is that it makes good sense to say both "our cousin's friend" and "our friend's cousin." We cannot say, on the other hand, both a "tired man" and a "man tired." Single adjectives obviously cannot follow nouns in most instances, not unless they are part of a relative clause or are predicate adjectives. In either of these cases, the copula or the relative clause marks the position of the adjective and helps the child to grasp the appropriate relationships.

Here is an example of an adjective in a comparative structure that follows the noun:

It is as sharp as a razor. A. It is a sharp razor. B. It is razor sharp.

Although this group of sentences exemplifying the use of an adjective in the comparative was not included in the category for adjective modification, it is of some note that thirteen of the children, especially in the two lower age groups, missed it.

Finally, the most difficult syntactic pattern of all is the direct object- indirect object combination; nine-year-olds choose the correct match only half the time. But here again there is a significant change in direction to better performance, this time between the ages of seven and eight. The difficulty of choosing the correct match is due to a conflict between sense and structure. All three sentences, as the first example in this paper indi- cates, are meaningful.

Children thus must give special attention to the preposition to, to its position in the sentence. Moreover, it seems evident that the pattern young- sters know best is the one with the preposition in it; if the preposition doesn't occur-for example, in an imitation exercise-they are likely to insert it before the last noun and thus restructure the sentence. If, moreover, there is validity to the argument that prepositions are attached to nouns as features of them, then the child has all the more reason to hear, as it were, the preposition to before the last noun, even when it is physically not there. That this imposition of to on the sentence is a likely possibility is under- scored by the fact that in other sentences children can track the position of particles without very much difficulty. For example, the following item re- quires the child to attend to the position of up:

John held up his hand and jumped. A. John held his hand up and jumped. B. John held his hand and jumped up.

Obviously it makes a difference whether up occurs after held or after jump. But whether the clause is he held his hand up or he held up his hand makes little difference; the position of the particle is optional. Only eight children missed making a correct choice, and half of them were in the youngest group.

To sum up, though children at age five and six can understand sentences, taken one at a time, containing many different optional transformations, they

194

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.104 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 04:42:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

COMPREHENSION OF SYNONYMOUS SENTENCES

still need to learn that sentences with these transformations may indeed be synonymous, differing merely as grammatical variants. This new learning is a further departure into the realm of comprehension, a realm at once more abstract and more liberating in the sense that children can use sentences not only to make themselves understood but also to make their language stylistically rich.

One can also infer from these findings something of the processes involved in the bilingualism of children and in their learning a second language. For example, if a bilingual child gradually learns to appreciate the abstract prop- erties of linguistic structures, just as monolingual children do, then at an early age he possibly does not regard his languages as separate entities, but uses them as alternatives to one another, depending on circumstance. This possibility also implies that the argument that separate languages are varia- tions on a basic theme is a correct one. The variations are modes of compre- hending and uttering the one central linguistic pattern we are biologically destined to develop. Only as bilingual children begin to mature and to develop more abstract modes of thought do they probably become more sharply aware of just how languages compare and contrast as structures.

If these remarks have any substance, then the implication for language learning is also clear. Young children learn second languages in a deeply personal context, in a context of emotional dependencies, maturation, and in growing familiarity with their immediate environment. At this stage a child is bilingual at a first order of understanding in which all his sensory modalities come into play, where what he hears is seconded by what he touches and sees. But older children, already aware of sentence structures in themselves, require formal instruction. For them, learning a second lan- guage is an intellectual exercise in the metaphoric sense of that word, in the sense that they lear the grammar of language systematically, usually out- side the realm of everyday life, and they learn it largely by memorizing and applying rules or practicing basic patterns by rote. I think one way of sum- ming up the difference is that most young bilinguals probably know how to use the words towel and handkerchief in two languages quite early; many adults never do.

195

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.104 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 04:42:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions