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Do young children understand comparatives?
Author(s) -
Bishop Dorothy,
Bourne Elizabeth
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1985.tb00964.x
Subject(s) - psychology , adjective , nonsense , task (project management) , sentence , linguistics , noun , contrast (vision) , noun phrase , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , biochemistry , philosophy , chemistry , management , gene , economics
Several studies have demonstrated good understanding of comparatives by 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds. We suggest that this result is artifactual and arises because testers have used tasks where the child can successfully respond to sentences such as ‘the A is bigger than the B’ simply by understanding ‘the A is big’. We tested 80 children aged from 4 to 7 years using a task where the child could not succeed simply by responding to the first half of the sentence, and found that the majority of 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds did not understand comparatives. Children's errors were not random but showed that they used two basic strategies to interpret sentences: a non‐linguistic strategy of selecting the largest objects, and a linguistic strategy of assigning the adjective to the first noun. It is not until 6 or 7 years of age that most children reliably respond correctly to comparatives. Even this may be an overestimate of understanding, since children of this age are quite unable to appreciate that a comparative construction using a nonsense adjective implies a contrast between the two nouns, although they can handle simpler sentences using nonsense adjectives quite adequately.