Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany.
Dev Psychol. 2012 Mar;48(2):521-9. doi: 10.1037/a0025526. Epub 2011 Oct 3.
The present study demonstrates that children experience difficulties reaching the correct situation model of multiple events described in temporal sentences if the sentences encode language-external events in reverse chronological order. Importantly, the timing of the cue of how to organize these events is crucial: When temporal subordinate conjunctions (before/after) or converb constructions that carry information of how to organize the events were given sentence-medially, children experienced severe difficulties in arriving at the correct interpretation of event order. When this information was provided sentence-initially, children were better able to arrive at the correct situation model, even if it required them to decode the linguistic information reversely with respect to the actual language external events. This indicates that children even aged 8-12 still experience difficulties in arriving at the correct interpretation of the event structure, if the cue of how to order the events is not given immediately when they start building the representation of the situation. This suggests that children's difficulties in comprehending sequential temporal events are caused by their inability to revise the representation of the current event structure at the level of the situation model.
本研究表明，如果句子以逆时间顺序编码语言外事件，儿童在理解时间句中描述的多个事件的正确情境模型时会遇到困难。重要的是，组织这些事件的线索的时间安排至关重要：当时间从属连词（before/after）或携带组织事件信息的动词连用结构在句中给出时，儿童在理解事件顺序的正确解释方面会遇到严重困难。当这些信息在句首提供时，儿童能够更好地理解正确的情境模型，即使这需要他们相对于实际的语言外事件反向解码语言信息。这表明，如果在开始构建情境表示时没有立即提供如何对事件进行排序的线索，即使是 8-12 岁的儿童，他们在理解事件结构的正确解释方面也会遇到困难。这表明，儿童在理解顺序时间事件方面的困难是由于他们无法在情境模型层面上修改当前事件结构的表示。
