Table 1 - uploaded by Heather Winskel
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The acquisition of temporal relations in the narratives of Thai children (aged 4 years, 6 years and 9 years) and of adults as control was investigated. Narratives were elicited using the `frog story'. Results revealed common and language-specific developmental patterns: (1) a developmental progression from relating events at a local to a more globa...
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Context 1
... aspect has been classified by Vendler (1967) into four main semantic predicate types: state, activity, accom- plishment, achievement. These can be characterized in terms of the following prop erties: durative or punctual, atelic or telic, dynamic or static, as summarized in Table 1 State and activity predicates are both durative and atelic, but activities also have the intrinsic property of being dynamic. Accomplishments are durative and telic, i.e., have a natural inherent endpoint. ...
Context 2
... frequency of tem- poral expressions in the different age groups was calculated with the aid of CLAN software. The different situation aspect types used with imperfective and perfective aspect markers and with temporal connectives with a when and while type func- tion, were classified according to Table 1 for the different age groups. The classifi- cation system outlined below was used to classify verbs and their predicates into states, activities, accomplishments and achievements (adapted from Cholchitha, 2005). ...
Context 3
... used phɔ:0 'when' with both telic and atelic predicates, as illustrated by examples 6a and 6b, whereas adults selected only telic predicates with this connective. Imperfective aspect marker 40 10 20 10 0 0 20 10 Simultaneous connective 10 20 40 20 60 40 50 20 Causal connective construction 0 10 0 The bees fly after the dog. (c) Relative clause: ma:4 kɔ:2 thi:2 phɯŋ2 tça1 laj2 toj1 nan3 kɔ:2 wiŋ2 pha:n1 na:2 dek1 tçhaj0 bop1 ma:0 The dog which the bees chase to sting, runs past in front of the boy Bob ...
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Citations
... Nas narrativas analisadas por Winskel (2007) de crianças tailandesas nas faixas etárias de 4, 6, 9 e um grupo teste de adultos, as crianças de 4 anos normalmente usam um sistema descritivo e monorreferencial, o tempo da fala é o único ponto de referência. Entretanto, há também exemplos de referências birreferenciais emergindo nessa faixa etária, com o uso dos conetivos equivalentes em inglês before, than e when. ...
... Segundo Winskel (2007), nas crianças tailandesas mais jovens há uma grande dependência do uso do aspecto gramatical. Conforme as crianças adquirem a habilidade de usar referentes birreferenciais, os conetivos temporais passam a obter um papel mais significativo. ...
... Em (5), abaixo, vê-se uma sequência de orações justapostas, sem nenhum conetivo, produzida por uma das crianças de 3 anos. Winskel (2007) mostra o mesmo tipo de estrutura em dados de crianças tailandesas, descrevendo esta estratégia como sendo comum em crianças de até 4 anos. Em tais estruturas, as relações temporais entre os eventos não são explicitadas, podendo ficar ambíguas ou abertas a interpretação (WINSKEL, 2007). ...
Este estudo investiga o padrão de uso dos recursos linguísticos utilizados por crianças de 3 a 6 anos para expressar relações temporais em narrativas orais. As narrativas sob análise são provenientes de um banco de dados constituído pela produção oral de 60 crianças entre 3 e 6 anos de idade dos municípios de Novo Hamburgo e Porto Alegre no Rio Grande do Sul. Os dados utilizados são de 8 destas crianças, 4 na faixa de 3 a 4 anos de idade e 4 na faixa de 5 a 6 anos de idade. A análise dos dispositivos que compõem o sistema temporal nas narrativas mostrou que, de forma geral, as crianças menores estruturam mais a sequencialidade dos eventos, enquanto que as crianças maiores já dominam de forma qualificada, ou seja, com maior articulação de dispositivos gramaticais e lexicais, tanto a sequencialidade quanto a simultaneidade entre os eventos da narrativa.
... This indicates that mature Chinese speakers have learned to rely on their communicative-pragmatic competence, based on explicit and implicit contextual information, and make a rather parsimonious usage of overt aspectual marking. This is confirmed by Winskel (2007) for Thai, a typological cognate. The slow maturation of the pragmatic/communicative competence is also mentioned by Vinnitskaya and Wexler (2001) to explain the behavior of Russian children between 3;0 and 6;5. ...
This article criticizes the widespread view, sometimes referred to as the " aspect first hypothesis " (initiated by Antinucci and Miller 1976 and supported by Bloom et al. 1980; Bickerton 1981; Weist et al. 1984; Shirai and Andersen 1995, among others), according to which a universal acquisition path is postulated in the tense-aspect domain, based on the leading role of actionality (or Aktionsart) and aspect. According to this view, children build their competence starting from the pervasive correlations atelic∴imperfective∴present vs. telic∴perfective∴past, before gradually learning to disentangle (i.e., freely combining) the various actional, aspectual, and temporal components. The alternative view advocated here (typologically-oriented and morphologically-sensitive) claims, instead, that children start out with no predefined strategy and extract the relevant information out of the individual language's morphological structure. The data stem from four longitudinal corpora relating to three Italian children and one Austrian German child, showing that: (i) the strong correlation between actionality, aspect, and tense can only be supported if activity and stative verbs are lumped together within the category of atelic predicates. Once activities are separately examined, their behavior stands out as absolutely incompatible with the traditional view. (ii) In the relevant languages, there can be earlier understanding of the temporality-oriented morphology as contrasted with the aspect-related categories. (iii) The analysis does not support the so-called prototype hypothesis (Shirai and Andersen 1995), since the examined children were strongly affected by their linguistic input from the very beginning. (iv) The children presented (to a greater or lesser extent) a notable verb spurt that very briefly preceded the first uses of the Past tenses. In conclusion, the actual acquisition path followed by the analyzed children undermines the hypothesis of a universal acquisition pattern, supporting instead the view that acquisition depends on the specific morphological shape of the target language.
... Cross-linguistic research on language acquisition has demonstrated the influence of the target language typology on language acquisition revealing that children's patterns of development are influenced by the typological or language-specific characteristics of their language (e.g. Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Choi, McDonough, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1999; Winskel, 2007). This principle can also be applied to literacy acquisition as children's patterns of development will also be influenced by the characteristics of the language and its orthography and how the spoken language maps on to the orthography (Gillis & Ravid, 2006). ...
Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in writing but follow it in speech, hence a mismatch between the spoken and written sequence occurs, for example
‘flat’ is spoken as
/bɛ:n/ or in a more severely misaligned example where the vowel operates across syllables the word
‘insect’ is spoken as
/m(a)lɛ:ŋ/. In order to investigate if there is a processing cost associated with this discrepancy between spoken and written sequence for vowels and the implications this has in relation to the grain size used when reading Thai, eye movements of adults reading words with and without misaligned vowels in sentences using the EyeLink II tracking system was conducted. Twenty-four university students read 50 pairs of words with misaligned and aligned vowel words matched for length and frequency embedded in same sentence frames. In addition, rapid naming data from forty adults was collected. Data from forty children 6;6–8;6 years old reading and spelling comparable words was also collected and analysed for errors. Results revealed a processing cost due to the more severely misaligned words where the vowel operates across the syllable, and gives support for a syllabic level of segmentation rather than phonemic for reading and spelling in Thai adults and children.
... IPA transcription is used for the transcription of all other Thai text. temporal connectives to signal both sequential and simultaneous temporal relations and introduces the main clause in these constructions (example (2) from the Thai frog story ; Winskel, 2007 ; Zlatev & Yangklang, forthcoming). (2) phc :0 dek1 no:n0 lap1 kop1 kc:2 e :p0 ni:4 paj0 when child sleep frog then sneak escape go ' When the child sleeps the frog escapes.' ...
Thai has imperfective aspectual morphemes that are not obligatory in usage, whereas English has obligatory grammaticized imperfective aspectual marking on the verb. Furthermore, Thai has verb final deictic-path verbs that form a closed class set. The current study investigated if obligatoriness of these grammatical categories in Thai and English affects the expression of co-occurring temporal events and actions depicted in three different short animations. Ten children aged four years, five years, six years and seven years, and ten adults as a comparison group from each of the two languages participated. English speakers explicitly expressed the ongoingness of the events more than Thai speakers, whereas Thai speakers expressed the entrance and exit of protagonists depicted in the animations significantly more than English speakers. These results support the notion that obligatory grammatical categories shape how Thai and English speakers express temporal events or actions.
... Coerenza e coesione sono due aspetti specifici ed essenziali nell'organizzazione di un testo, inteso come una forma comunicativa (De Beaugrande & Dressler 1994 ;Hickman 2004 ;Winskel 2007) ; in tal senso, dunque, assumono un ruolo fondamentale nell'organizzazione di un discorso narrativo. ...
... For a fuller account of the expression of temporal relations in Thai narratives please refer toWinskel (2007) or email the author for a copy of the article at h.winskel@uws.edu.au. ...
... Cross-linguistic research on language acquisition has demonstrated the influence of the target language typology on language acquisition revealing that children's patterns of development are influenced by the typological or language-specific characteristics of their language (e.g. Choi & Bowerman, 1991;Choi, McDonough, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1999;Winskel, 2007). This principle can also be applied to literacy acquisition as children's patterns of development will also be influenced by the characteristics of the language and its orthography and how the spoken language maps on to the orthography (Gillis & Ravid, 2006). ...
In Thai vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant.Of particular interest to the current study is that some vowels can precede the consonant in writing but follow it in speech, hence a mismatch between the spoken and written sequence occurs, e.g. the word pen would be written as epn or camel written as ecaml. A processing cost has been found for these misaligned vowels in Devanagari in Hindi speakers (Vaid & Gupta, 2002). In order to investigate this discrepancy between spatial positioning and temporal sequencing for vowels in Thai, eye movements of twenty university students reading 50 pairs of words with misaligned and aligned vowel words matched for length and frequency embedded in same sentence frames was conducted. In addition, rapid naming data from 40 adults was collected. Behavioural data from children 6 to 9 years old reading and spelling comparable words was also analysed. Results from these studies will be discussed in relation to the overriding question whether there is an additional processing cost due to this mismatch and the implications this has in relation to the grain size used when reading Thai.
This study examines the expression of simultaneity in the film-based oral narratives of 100 English monolinguals in the following three age groups: preschoolers (4–6 years), school-aged children (7–10 years), and adults (19–48 years). Participants told a story of what happened in the film, in an off-line task, to an interviewer who had not seen the film. The film was rich in simultaneous events at various sites through the episodic structure. Focus was on quantitative and qualitative aspects of simultaneity, from the perspective of forms and functions. Quantitative results showed very little simultaneity at preschool and almost similar expression at school age and adulthood. Qualitative analyses revealed that perceptual, semantic, and discourse factors affected the profiles of development. Preschool children expressed local simultaneity between situations in adjacent clauses, more frequently between unbounded situations that are implicitly simultaneous. Besides, they tended to express more simultaneity in scenes that were perceived in a single screen shot. From age 7, children became more able to express simultaneity across larger stretches of the text, covering a wider scope on situations on parallel timelines. Top-down knowledge of narrative organization guided older narrators to take temporal perspectives that go beyond the semantic properties of events, giving way to discourse-motivated simultaneity where causality plays a substantial role. Language forms to express simultaneity showed a long developmental route – through verb semantic and tense-aspect alternations as the widest, basic usage to specific lexical forms like conjunctions (e.g. while), adverbs (e.g. meanwhile), and more sophisticated syntactic configurations. The form-function analyses enabled an exploration of the cognitive and language abilities in the production of simultaneous relations under the constraints of narrative discourse organization. The study reinforced the results of previous developmental studies of temporality, shedding further light on the relatively unexplored topic of simultaneity expression.
