Children's comprehension of contrastive connectives.

Young Children's Comprehension of Logical Connectives

Young Children's Comprehension of Temporal Relations in Complex Sentences: The Influence of Memory on Performance

The present study investigated 3- to 7-year-olds' (N = 91) comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after. The youngest children used an order of mention strategy to interpret the relation between clauses: They were more accurate when the presentation order matched the chronological order of events: "He ate his lunch, before he played in the garden" (c...

But vs. Although under the microscope

Previous experimental studies on concessive connectives have only looked at their local facilitating or predictive effect on discourse relation comprehension and have often viewed them as a class of discourse markers with similar effects. We look into the effect of two connectives, but and although, for inferring contrastive vs. concessive discourse relations to complement previous experimental...

Learning Contrastive Connectives in Sentence Realization Ranking

We look at the average frequency of contrastive connectives in the SPaRKy Restaurant Corpus with respect to realization ratings by human judges. We implement a discriminative n-gram ranker to model these ratings and analyze the resulting n-gram weights to determine if our ranker learns this distribution. Surprisingly, our ranker learns to avoid contrastive connectives. We look at possible expla...

Context and Strategy in Acquiring Temporal Connectives 1

There has been considerable debate over the role of comprehension strategies in the acquisition of temporal connectives. This study examined the role of clause logic and interpretational strategies in the acquisition of temporal words; age-related changes were also considered. Thirty-two children between 3 and 5 years of age served as subjects. Sentences with a variety of temporal words were us...