Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University, 2333 AK Leiden, the Netherlands; School of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences, Örebro University, 701 82 Örebro, Sweden.
Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University, 2333 AK Leiden, the Netherlands.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2019 Sep;185:1-18. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.04.007. Epub 2019 May 8.
In two experiments, we examined 9- to 12-year-old children's comprehension and processing of two-clause sentences with a temporal connective (before or after) in the sentence-medial or sentence-initial position. We obtained measures of individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity and WM updating to test their contributions to comprehension. We measured the accuracy of children's responses to the questions "What happened first?" (Experiment 1; N = 74) and "What happened last?" (Experiment 2; N = 50) as well as their sentence reading times. Together, these experiments show continued development of comprehension of temporal relations in children in upper elementary school and suggest that children's comprehension difficulties (i.e., more comprehension errors and longer reading times) were influenced by clause salience and recency effects rather than sentence chronology or the familiarity of the connective. Our findings are consistent with a memory resource-limited account and suggest that individual differences in WM updating and WM capacity make dissociable contributions to processing and comprehension of sentences with temporal order information.
在两项实验中，我们考察了 9-12 岁儿童对句中位置（句中或句首）为时间连接词（之前或之后）的两从句句子的理解和加工。我们获取了工作记忆（WM）容量和 WM 更新的个体差异测量值，以检验它们对理解的贡献。我们测量了儿童对以下问题回答的准确性：“先发生了什么？”（实验 1；N=74）和“最后发生了什么？”（实验 2；N=50）以及他们的句子阅读时间。总的来说，这些实验表明，在上小学高年级的儿童对时间关系的理解仍在不断发展，并表明儿童的理解困难（即更多的理解错误和更长的阅读时间）受到从句突出和近因效应的影响，而不是句子的时间顺序或连接词的熟悉程度。我们的发现与记忆资源有限的解释一致，并表明 WM 更新和 WM 容量的个体差异对具有时间顺序信息的句子的加工和理解有可区分的贡献。
