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Children's comprehension of ‘before’ and ‘after’ reinvestigated*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Anna Trosborg
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Abstract

The present paper is concerned with establishing the relative difficulty involved in the acquisition of the temporal conjunctions before and after. It tries to control the influence on performance of the following variables: contextual support within a sentence (logically/arbitrarily ordered sequences), order of mention, syntactic complexity, task requirement variables, and memory load. In addition, experiments intended to throw light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying an understanding of these conjuctions are described. The concept of time is supposed to be spatial in origin. An understanding of relative time is dependent on ability to decentre and coordinate. Finally, it is suggested that reversible thinking (in a Piagetian sense) is involved in the process of making inverse sentence order agree with event order.

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Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 381 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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Footnotes

[*]

Author's address: University of Aarhus, Department of English, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.

References

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