Susan A. Gelman & Lakshmi Raman
- What is the issue?
- How well children and adults remember generic utterances
- What are the goals?
- To determine what is retained of a generic statement over time
- To determine whether recall of content is affected by sentence form
- What are the predictions?
- Young children will appropriately recall whether sentences were presented as either generic or specific
- Memory for both subject and predicate content would be stronger for generic than specific sentences
- What was the procedure?
- First study: Children (3-4 years) and college students were shown photos of eight items and were told a property for each which they were told they would be asked to recall. After a four minute distractor task participants were shown the picture again and asked to recall what was said. The study was then repeated for another eight items but the wording condition was changed.
- What were the results?
- Participants produced more generics in the generic condition than in the specific condition
- Participants remembered the label of the item more accurately in the generic wording condition than the specific wording condition
- There was increased performance in sentence recall with age
- Follow up procedures
- Second study: 4-year-olds completed the same study again but this time the wording condition did not switch between the two trials to eliminate confounding variables such as fatigue and order effect.
- Results: Same as the first study!
- Third study: 4-year-olds and college students completed the same study again but this time the conditions were mixed within the two trials.
- Results: This time, 4-year-olds were more likely than college students to recall sentences in generic form! The results for sentence labeling and accuracy were consistent with those in the first and second study.
- Fourth study: 4-year-olds and college students completed the same study again but this time all the items were presented in either singular form for half of the participants or plural form for the other half.
- Results: The generic/nongeneric distinction was weakest for 4-year-olds in the singular condition but they distinguished generic and specific in both the singular condition and the plural condition. The most common difficultly was for sentences that had been presented as singular to be recalled as plural. The 4-year-olds had more difficulty recalling singular generics as singular.
- Second study: 4-year-olds completed the same study again but this time the wording condition did not switch between the two trials to eliminate confounding variables such as fatigue and order effect.
- Findings
- When the children correctly recalled generic singular sentences as generic, they recalled them as singular less than half the time, suggesting that children can interpret singular sentences generically.
- Since there was a greater semantic importance of plurality in the case of specific sentences, this indicates that memory for plurality was better is better with specific sentences.
- Since the children recalled more predicate content for generics in the plural condition than for generics in the singular condition, this suggests that when children are asked for their immediate recall of sentences, items that require greater processing resources lead to relatively impaired performance.
- What does this all mean?
- Children retain the distinction between generic and specific sentences in long-term memory!
- Generic language may have a long-term effect on children’s reasoning.
Courtney Leopold
PSY390: Article Presentation
November 7, 2007