Young children and the say/mean distinction: verbatim and paraphrase recognition in narrative and nursery rhyme contexts.
Children's ability to distinguish between the text, what was said, and the intentional structure, what was meant, was interrogated by means of verbatim and paraphrase questions in two types of discourse, narratives and nursery rhymes. Three- to seven-year-olds participated (n = 119, mean age 5.1). There was an interaction between the type of discourse and the younger children's ability to separate wording from intentional structure. In the narrative form they had difficulty rejecting true paraphrases when asked to focus on wording, while in the nursery rhyme form the difficulty was accepting a true paraphrase when asked to focus on intention.
Lee
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Department of Language and Literacy Education, 2125 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada. elizabeth.lee@ubc.ca
Torrance
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Olson
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D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary