Research article summary (published 27 Feb 2002):

Perspective-taking and comprehension of passive sentences by Japanese-speaking children.

Full 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 observedfor 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 fill perspective-taking ability required for comprehension of passive sentences.

Author information

Author/s: Suzuki, Takaaki (T);

Affiliation: Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan. takaaki(-atsign-)cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Journal of psycholinguistic research (J Psycholinguist Res), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Mar; vol 31 (issue 2) : pp 131-44

Dates: Created 2002/05/22; Completed 2002/11/19; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12022792, status: MEDLINE (last retrieved date: 2/18/2009)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MeSH Headings (categories) shown below.

Child Child, Preschool Cognition Humans

Humans Language Speech Perception Verbal Behavior

Note: Bold headings indicate primary MeSH headings or qualifiers.

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