Haynes, Rebecca A.

Scholl, Kathleen P.

Sharifi, Hassan

Stick, Sheldon L.

English

KU ScholarWorks

COMPREHENSION OF SELECTED LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS BY NORMAL 36 TO 66 MO~TH OLD CHILDREN AND 72 TO 144 MONTH OLD MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN Sheldon L Stick, Hassan Sharifi, Rebecca A Haynes, and Kathleen P Scholl The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Language assessments of children and adults have been predi-cated upon test scores that enables a practitioner to profile re-lative strengths and weaknesses in verbal and nonverbal language Useful as they were, these efforts failed to explain or describe how an individual used verbal language Linguistics has provided Speech Pathology with the vehicle for combining obJect1ve indices of verbal and nonverbal language with descriptions of how spoken language is used However, this new means of adding precision to language evaluations and subsequent therapy isnot without problems, the maJor one being an absence of a standard for acquisition of se-lected linguistic constructions (Bellugi, 1968) This study was conducted to obtain normative data on how children understand the following three aspects of spoken language (1) left to right word patterns, (2) word regularities, (3) word relationships Ten dif-ferent syntactic constructions were selected in order to test the deep and surface relationships among the various elements SubJects The data was gathered from 75 children in nursery schools in Lincoln, Nebraska The children were divided into six month inter-vals, ranging from 36 to 66 months Five boys and five girls at intervals of 42, 48, and 66 months, ten boys and ten girls at 54 and 60 months, three boys and two girls at the interval of 36 to 41 months were tested Criteria for the selection of children were chronological age within two months of the established six months intervals, absence of any known emotional, neurological, or sensory (visual problems correctable by glasses were acceptable) problems, teacher affirmation that the child's language performance was com-parable to that of similar age children In addition, 62 educable and trainable mentally retarded children (37 males and 25 females) with chronological ages varying from 72 to 138 months were given the same tasks Each of the 137 subJects was required to demonstrate compre-hension of the different linguistic constru~tions by manipulating 504 COMPREHENSION BY NORMAL AND MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN 505 small obJects in a specific manner Words used for all test items were selected from word frequency lists showing them to be within the expected vocabulary of a preschool child Furthermore, the clinician identified each key item as it was presented The fol-lowing directions were given to all children "I am going to show you some toys These toys can do many things I will show you what they do When I ask you to show me, you do what I have done Are you ready?" At that point, two demonstration items were presented Upon satis-factory completion of the demonstration items, each child then was told "I am going to say something that the toys can do you to make the toys do what I say " I want Each stimulus item then was presented aurally and the child was required to give a nonverbal response (manipulation of the ob-Jects) Verbalization was discouraged Stimuli Only those items pertaining to the immediate sentence were presented and arranged in a manner that provided no situational cues Twenty examples of each of the following syntactic construc-tion were presented l Action Constructions required the child to understand the relationship between subJect and ob]ect of an active transitive verb The dog chased the horse The horse chased the dog 2 Singular-Plural Noun Inflection required the recogni-tion of the plural morpheme in nouns Give me the car Give me the cars 3 Singular-Plural Verb Inflection required the child to understand the relation between singular-plural sub-Jects and the verb The girl walks The girls walk 506 4 sentences 1975 MID-AMERICA LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE required understanding of the obJect roles and their rela-surface word order of the passive The horse is chased by the dog ~The dog is chased by the horse 5 required the child to comprehend noun was in a state described by the adJec-ti ve or past participle in the sentence While all of these sentences had some form of "be , 11 half of them had other auxiliaries such as 11 can," and "have " The baby is covered The dress is clean 6 Negative State Constructions required the comprehen-sion of a negative state signaled by negative morpheme "not" attached to the auxiliary The baby is not covered The dress is not clean 7 Negative Contractions required the contraction of negative morpheme "not" in the above stated construc-tions 8 The baby isn't covered The dress isn't clean ..:_.:...:_.:._;_:_;_:::.......::.......::........:...:;_--=.=---~--~:..E.:.::.::..;::.......::......._;;_--- were a test s prefix "un-" added to the adJective or past participle describing a state The baby is uncovered The dress is unclean 9 with Negative Affix required the child co-occurence of the negative morpheme attached to the auxiliary with the negative affix, pre-fixed to the adJective or past participle The baby is not uncovered The dress is not unclean COMPREHENSION BY NORMAL AND MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN 10 Negative Contraction with Negative Affix required the 1.lllderstanding of contraction form of the nega-tive morpheme attached to the auxiliary verb in the presence of a negative affix Results The baby isn't covered The dress isn't unclean 507 The intent was to use that information for clinical compari-sons However, the results of the study lead to some interesting observations about the nature of language learning and the rele-vance of the linguistic theory proposed by Chafe (1970) For the normal children, simple central tendency data was obtained at each age level (Table 1) Table 1 Mean percentage correct scores for the normal children according to age level on each syntactic construction (N=75) Sentence Type Age in Months 36 42 48 54 60 66 1) Action Constructions 82 80 94 98 100 99 2) Singular/Plural Noun Inflection 84 85 92 95 100 100 3) Singular/Plural Verb Inflection 78 78 84 93 96 100 4) Passive Constructions 45 58 73 76 82 86 5) State Constructions 91 92 99 98 99 99 6) Negative State Constructions 78 79 95 96 95 95 7) Negative Contractions 67 58 86 94 95 97 8) State Contractions with Negative Affix 46 45 57 47 67 64 9) Negative State with Negative Affix 15 11 24 26 33 40 10) Negative Contractions with Negative Affix 23 13 20 26 33 49 508 1975 MID-AMERICA LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE The trend of increasingly higher scores with older children was obvious Also, it can be seen that a hierarchy of apparent difficulty existed, in which the easiest items were state construc-tions followed by singular/plural noun inflection The most dif-ficult items were the negative state with negative affix The fol-lowing specific comments are made about Table 1 Children at all age levels comprehend the action constructlons well They understand the relationships between a verb and its agent and patient Children at the age levels tested had high comprehension for the notion of noun plurality as signalled by /s/ and /z/ However, this performance, the comprehension for inflectional endings, did not carry over to verbs until the children were 54 months of age Passive constructions were among the most difficult to com-prehend for all of the normal children In contrast, understand-ing of state constructions usually is achieved by children 36 months of It is noteworthy that the subJects might have per-formed even if the auxillaries, such as can and have, were eliminated from the stimuli ~- ~~ Comprehension of the negative state was comparable to under-standing of state constructions by the time children were 48months of age Interestingly, comprehension of the negative contractions also reached a reasonably high level (86 per cent correct) at the same time However, the younger children (36 and 42 months) did show some apparent difficulty with the contractions State constructions with the negative affix were under-stood between 45 and 67 per cent of the time by at all of the age levels tested It was interesting to note that children60 months correctly responded to between 12 and 14 of the 20 sentences, but college trained adults considered only 10 of the 20 sentences as acceptable Certainly this argues for a closer examination of the test stimuli, and might mean that comprehension is dependent upon factors other than recognizing surface structure relation-ships The central tendency scores reported in Table 1 show that, predictably, children could comprehend only a small number of nega-tive state with negative affix sentences The difficulty under-standing these constructions probably was related to interpreting the un- affix in relation to the words to which it was added, and COMPREHENSION BY NORMAL AND MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN 509 to the complexity of the selected linguistic constructions Con-trary to a commonly accepted belief that contractions are very com-plex grammatical structures, the data in Table 1 shows children understood the negative contraction with negative affix sentences as well or better than the negative state with negative affix sen-tences A direct comparison between the percentage of correct scores earned by the normal preschool children and the mentally retarded subJects is misleading because of the variations in chronological ages between the two groups Table 2, below, presents data that shows the range of chronological ages of the mentally retarded children It should be noted that the normal preschool children ranged in age from 36 to 71 months Table 2 Number of mentally retarded sub]ects according to their chronological ages Chronological age in months Male Female Total 72 - 84 9 5 14 85 - 97 10 7 17 98 - 103 8 4 12 108 - 115 5 4 9 118 - 122 4 1 5 124 - 142 1 4 5 Total 37 25 62 Range 72 - 142 months Mean 114 months Extensive chronological age differences created ambiguity when attempting to interpret the data, until the mentallyretarded blO 1975 MID-AMERICA LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE subJects were grouped according to their respective mental age levels (Table 3) Table 3 Number of mentally retarded subJects according to mental age levels Male 36 - 42 10 10 20 43 - 49 5 3 8 50 - 56 10 9 19 57 63 8 3 11 64 - 70 4 4 Total 37 25 62 Range 36 - 66 months Mean 49 months Table 3 shows that despite the wide chronological age varia-tion (72 142 months) the mentally retarded SubJects could be grouped reasonably well by mental ages The actually was highly comparable to the chronological ages of normal children It is important to recognize that no effort was made to determine if the higher mental age levels were associated with the chrono-logically older retarded children Using the mental age groupings, as shown in Table 3, the mean percentage of correct responses to each linguistic construction was determined (Table 4) The data show (Tables 1 and 4) that the retarded children generally par-alleled the performance of the normal preschool children, but at a noticeably slower rate The lag in comprehension of the sel..ected linguistic constructions among the retarded children apparently was not a uniform phenomenon, since several types of sentences were consistently easier to understand This pattern was similar to the one noted for the normal subJects The greatest percentage score differences between the two populations occurred when the test sentences had unusual sub]ect-verb-obJect order and when transformations were made COMPREHENSION BY NORMAL AND MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN 511 Table 4 Mean percentage correct scores for the mentally retarded children according to mental age level on each syntactic construction (N = 62) Sentence Types Age in Months 36-42 43-49 50-56 57-63 64-70 1) Action constructions 53 64 80 93 99 2) Singular/plural noun inflection 53 68 71 86 93 3) Singular/plural verb inflect ion 49 58 73 85 96 4) Passive constructions 51 47 65 81 94 5) State constructions 39 54 51 53 71 6) Negative state constructions 33 48 62 79 81 7) Negative contractions 19 25 31 34 50 8) State contractions with negative affix 10 15 25 47 81 9) Negative state with negative affix 12 22 19 24 24 10) Negative contractions with negative affix 11 21 17 21 15 A striking fact observed was that when the mentally retarded children reached the mental age equivalent of 57 months or older their performance approximated that of the normal preschool chil-dren of a comparable chronological age This was the most nota-ble for the action constructions, singular/plural noun inflectiors, singular/plural verb inflections, and passive constructions State constructions, which were easiest for all normal children, unex-plainably were difficult even for the 64-70 month group of mentally retarded children 512 1975 MID-AMERICA LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE The data indicates that the simplest syntactic construction for normal children to comprehend is the State next is what we have called the used for plural-singular prehension of the plural ~orpheme in nouns, but nized that they involved the simultaneous comprehension Sentences dealing with pluPal verbs and thus required the of t~e notion of agent or actor re cog-The sequence for easier comprehension of the selected lin-guistic construction samples by this study were State, Action, Noun Inflection, Verb Inflection This hierarchy is discus'3ed in the proposed by Wallace L Chafe ( 1970) , in his Chafe claims that the universe is into two ma]or areas of verbs and nouns The verb, which is the central element ) of the sentence, embraces states and events State verbs hier-archically come before the other types of verbS--When a verb is it and/or The construction types 1, 2, 5), Action (type 3), and constructions (type 5)were the by all children (type 6) followed closely after Active singular-plural Noun Inflection (type 2) rest of the constructions were relatively children , and The mean scores for the low, even for the older When the other linguistic constructions were evaluated it was observed that the data was in accord with t~e observations that Passives were acquired later than Active sentences An obvious question that arises is why do c~ildren do so much poorer on pas-sives when they comprehend the transitive verb constructions (type 1 constructions) very well Re-stated, the question is why should they have difficulty with this pattern, especially if there is no meaningful difference between the passive and active forms of the same sentence? If the process of language learning is viewed from a non-behavioristic point of view, it is seen that grammar is a set of rules that match sounds and meaning Children acquire these rules in a sequence The more basic rules needed for matching of meaning to sounds are learned first If we subscribe to Chafe's ideas that rules dealing with semantic notions of verbs are devel-oped earliest, ( i e , etc ) and these verbs influence the function COMPREHENSION BY NORMAL AND MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN 513 (i e , patient, agent, etc ), other rules, such as tense agreement in verbs, are developed later as are optional stylistic rules It can be conJectured that either the semantic content of these later developed rules are not as essential, or there are alternative methods available to children for matching the semantic element to sound patterns This study provided two examples of later develop-ing rules, Passive and State Construction with Negative Affix Passive transformations, contrary to accepted belief, do have a semantic content Chafe (1970, p 219) explains that the mean-ingful difference between active and passive sentences has to do with the semantic notions of old and new information However, it is obvious that children can convey the same information through the use of other rules of grammar at their disposal, namely, the phonological rule of STRESS The syntactic construction used in passives need not be learned as early as other basic rules This we believe could account for the poor performances on the Passive Constructions (type 4) Another noteworthy fact was the generally low mean scores for State Construction with Negative Affix sentences (type 8) Sev-eral explanations for this fact are possible Slobin (1971) sug-gested that affixes are learned at a later stage of acquisition This ffil.ght be the case with the negative prefix un- However, in this case, we should recognize two different factors (a,) the sem-antic content of the prefix, and (b) the co-occurrence restriction between the prefix and the word to which it is added It is the latter restrictions that seem to have given us the low scores Semantically speaking, prefix un- negates the word to which it is added and creates an antonym "!fut syntactically it could be added to a set of special words Depending on the reaction of children to the semantic factor or to the morphological restriction, they will score differently A most interesting aspect about this study was that most children reacted to the semantic content of the prefix The children could accept and interpret the sentences with un- with greater frequency than adults It is a fact of lan-guage--:t"hat there is more than one way of saying Your zipper is open for example , Your zipper is unzipped Likewise, it is semantically reasonable to agree, as children did, that another way of saying 514 1975 MID-AMERICA LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE The box is light, is The box is unheavy Most adults reacting to the non-semantic factors, namely the co-occurrence restriction between un- and heavy, did not accept the alternative method The mentally retarded subJects demonstrated a continuing pattern of acquisition but at an appreciably slower rate of lan-guage maturation Perhaps the notably higher per cent correct scores on certain sentence types reflected that these children had greater familiarity with certain linguistic constructions, as a consequence of limited experience and restricted environments In addition, consideration needs to be given to the possibility that the retarded children were limited in their ability to process the more complex linguistic structures This would indicate that the nature of a task, as it relates to the subJect and the immediate environment, is important The above observations, namely the fact that children reacted to semantically relevant elements of language, leads to the con-clusion that Speech Pathologists and psycholinguists should re-direct their research efforts toward understanding the semantic structure of language used by children This would be of para-mount importance when structuring language intervention programs BIBLIOGRAPHY Bellugi, U , Some Language Comprehension Tests, in C Lavatelli (Ed ) Urbana, Slobin, D , Psycholinguistics man and Company (1971) Chicago The Glenview, Illinois Scott Fores-

COMPREHENSION OF SELECTED LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS BY NORMAL 36 TO 66 MONTH OLD CHILDREN AND 72 TO 144 MONTH OLD MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN

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COMPREHENSION OF SELECTED LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS BY NORMAL 36 TO 66 MONTH OLD CHILDREN AND 72 TO 144 MONTH OLD MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN

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