Time after time: Factors influencing children’s comprehension of Before and After

Abstract

We investigated older children’s (7–12 years) ability to comprehend before and after sentences. Results found that three factors that influence pre-school aged children’s learning of these words continues to influence older children’s comprehension. Specifically, children’s accuracy is improved when the events can be naturally (vs. arbitrarily) ordered; when the clauses in the sentence iconically match (vs. mismatch) the order of the events in the world; and when sentences use before (vs. after). The first two factors are argued to directly facilitate the building of mental models while the last one does so indirectly because of patterns of input usage.

Comprehension of complex sentences containing temporal connectives: How children are led down the event-semantic kindergarten-path

“…3 In short, evidence for iconicity effects seems to be present to some extent, though not very robustly, across different tasks, including picture-sequence selection. Considering the age of the children tested, while iconicity may play some role in comprehension in younger children, no general iconicity effects have been found in studies with children over the age of eight, regardless of the task used (Karlsson et al, 2019;Overweg et al, 2018;Papakonstantinou, 2015;Pyykkönen & Järvikivi, 2012;Wagner & Holt, 2023).…”

“…Before summarizing the findings of previous studies with respect to the main linguistic factors investigated, we would like to highlight that different findings may result from the fact that the studies tested children of different ages and, more importantly, from the different methods used. Regarding the age range of the participants, research focused on preschool and young primary school childrenthat is, up to age five or sevenwhile studies on children aged eight and older are still scarce (for exceptions, see Overweg et al, 2018;Papakonstantinou, 2015;Wagner & Holt, 2023;for reading: Pyykkönen & Järvikivi, 2012;Karlsson et al, 2019). Notably, none of the studies with older children found fully target-like comprehension of the connectives; even twelve-year-olds had difficulties with one or more of the conditions presented in (1) and ( 2).…”

“…In one variant, the 'What happened first/last?' task, children listened to sentences with before and after and had to choose the picture of the event that happened first or last (English: Blything & Cain, 2016;Blything et al, 2015;Wagner & Holt, 2023;Dutch: Overweg et al, 2018;Greek: Tsakali & Vamvouka, 2021). A similar design was used in two studies that examined comprehension of the connectives in written language (Finnish: Pyykkönen & Järvikivi, 2012;Dutch: Karlsson et al, 2019).…”

“…The majority of 'What happened first/last?' studies found either no effects of iconicity (Karlsson et al, 2019;Overweg et al, 2018;Tsakali & Vamvouka, 2021) or partial effects (for before: Blything et al, 2015, for after: Pyykkönen & Järvikivi, 2012Wagner & Holt, 2023). Only one study reported a general advantage of iconic over non-iconic sentences (Blything & Cain, 2016).…”

“…task provided an even more diverse picture. Two studies found a general advantage of before (Overweg et al, 2018;Wagner & Holt, 2023), two studies found a partial advantage of before, in the iconic (Blything et al, 2015) or in the non-iconic condition (Tsakali & Vamvouka, 2021), and one study found no difference between the connectives (Blything & Cain, 2016). Notably, the findings of a recent reading study with nine-to twelve-yearold Dutch-speaking children (Karlsson et al, 2019) suggest that difficulty of the connective may depend on the specific instruction: when asked to choose the picture of the event that happened first, children performed better with before-sentences; but when asked to choose the picture of the event that happened last, children performed better with after-sentences.…”