What can we learn from children's "mistakes"?
Конференцијски прилог (Објављена верзија)
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Experimental paradigms impose certain pragmatic demands on the participants in a way that they
have to understand and follow the experimenter’s instructions and behave accordingly.
During the experiment participants’ mistakes are expected and treated either as random and
excluded from further analysis, or as revealing of the phenomenon that is investigated. Although
prepared for the former, experimenters working with pre-schoolers are also often faced with
mistakes of different nature.
Because of their intensive cognitive and language development, pre-schoolers are a very interesting
population for psycholinguistic researchers, but also require careful preparation of the experimental
procedure. It includes taking into account the children’s comprehension of the instructions and the
situation in a way that is different from that of adults, in a way that is communicatively and
pragmatically more relevant to them. As long as the experimenter is capable of predicting preschoolers...’
understanding of the task and adapting it accordingly, the experimental procedure will
work. However, sometimes their different perception of the task and its pragmatic characteristics
becomes obvious only during, or even after the experiment, when the responses are analysed. If left
undetected, these mistakes may influence the results and lead to wrong conclusions about the
investigated phenomenon.
We will illustrate the influence of pre-schoolers understanding of the pragmatics of a task on their
performance through the “mistakes” they made in three different experimental procedures we have
used: the non-word repetition task in estimation of phonological abilities, the naming task in the
human body parts vocabulary assessment, and the choice task in testing verbal aspect
comprehension. In the non-word repetition and naming task, the original instructions created for
adults were partly adapted for pre-schoolers, but nevertheless some children understood the task in
an unexpected way. In the choice task, the experimental procedure and instructions were the same
as for adults, and it seemed that children followed them successfully. However, the qualitative
analysis revealed that some of children’s mistakes were probably the result of their susceptibility to
pragmatic characteristics of the task, instead of insufficient comprehension of the verbal aspect
semantics.
We will argue that any task with complex pragmatic properties and metalinguistic use of language is
a prolific ground for children’s mistakes and that the following questions should be considered: are
we as experimenters always sensitive to pre-schoolers' understanding of the pragmatics of our
tasks, and to what extent is it allowed to adapt the task instructions and the procedure while
ensuring that we are targeting the same phenomenon in pre-schoolers and adults.
Кључне речи:
preschool children / experimental procedure / pragmatics / mistakes / predškolska deca / eksperimentalna procedura / pragmatika / greškeИзвор:
Current Trends in Psychology, 2017, 27-28Издавач:
- Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Novom Sadu
Финансирање / пројекти:
- Fundamentalni kognitivni procesi i funkcije (RS-179033)
Институција/група
Psihologija / PsychologyTY - CONF AU - Savić, Maja AU - Anđelković, Darinka AU - Popović, Maša PY - 2017 UR - http://stup.ff.uns.ac.rs/STuP_2017.pdf UR - http://reff.f.bg.ac.rs/handle/123456789/4652 AB - Experimental paradigms impose certain pragmatic demands on the participants in a way that they have to understand and follow the experimenter’s instructions and behave accordingly. During the experiment participants’ mistakes are expected and treated either as random and excluded from further analysis, or as revealing of the phenomenon that is investigated. Although prepared for the former, experimenters working with pre-schoolers are also often faced with mistakes of different nature. Because of their intensive cognitive and language development, pre-schoolers are a very interesting population for psycholinguistic researchers, but also require careful preparation of the experimental procedure. It includes taking into account the children’s comprehension of the instructions and the situation in a way that is different from that of adults, in a way that is communicatively and pragmatically more relevant to them. As long as the experimenter is capable of predicting preschoolers’ understanding of the task and adapting it accordingly, the experimental procedure will work. However, sometimes their different perception of the task and its pragmatic characteristics becomes obvious only during, or even after the experiment, when the responses are analysed. If left undetected, these mistakes may influence the results and lead to wrong conclusions about the investigated phenomenon. We will illustrate the influence of pre-schoolers understanding of the pragmatics of a task on their performance through the “mistakes” they made in three different experimental procedures we have used: the non-word repetition task in estimation of phonological abilities, the naming task in the human body parts vocabulary assessment, and the choice task in testing verbal aspect comprehension. In the non-word repetition and naming task, the original instructions created for adults were partly adapted for pre-schoolers, but nevertheless some children understood the task in an unexpected way. In the choice task, the experimental procedure and instructions were the same as for adults, and it seemed that children followed them successfully. However, the qualitative analysis revealed that some of children’s mistakes were probably the result of their susceptibility to pragmatic characteristics of the task, instead of insufficient comprehension of the verbal aspect semantics. We will argue that any task with complex pragmatic properties and metalinguistic use of language is a prolific ground for children’s mistakes and that the following questions should be considered: are we as experimenters always sensitive to pre-schoolers' understanding of the pragmatics of our tasks, and to what extent is it allowed to adapt the task instructions and the procedure while ensuring that we are targeting the same phenomenon in pre-schoolers and adults. PB - Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Novom Sadu C3 - Current Trends in Psychology T1 - What can we learn from children's "mistakes"? EP - 28 SP - 27 UR - https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_reff_4652 ER -
@conference{ author = "Savić, Maja and Anđelković, Darinka and Popović, Maša", year = "2017", abstract = "Experimental paradigms impose certain pragmatic demands on the participants in a way that they have to understand and follow the experimenter’s instructions and behave accordingly. During the experiment participants’ mistakes are expected and treated either as random and excluded from further analysis, or as revealing of the phenomenon that is investigated. Although prepared for the former, experimenters working with pre-schoolers are also often faced with mistakes of different nature. Because of their intensive cognitive and language development, pre-schoolers are a very interesting population for psycholinguistic researchers, but also require careful preparation of the experimental procedure. It includes taking into account the children’s comprehension of the instructions and the situation in a way that is different from that of adults, in a way that is communicatively and pragmatically more relevant to them. As long as the experimenter is capable of predicting preschoolers’ understanding of the task and adapting it accordingly, the experimental procedure will work. However, sometimes their different perception of the task and its pragmatic characteristics becomes obvious only during, or even after the experiment, when the responses are analysed. If left undetected, these mistakes may influence the results and lead to wrong conclusions about the investigated phenomenon. We will illustrate the influence of pre-schoolers understanding of the pragmatics of a task on their performance through the “mistakes” they made in three different experimental procedures we have used: the non-word repetition task in estimation of phonological abilities, the naming task in the human body parts vocabulary assessment, and the choice task in testing verbal aspect comprehension. In the non-word repetition and naming task, the original instructions created for adults were partly adapted for pre-schoolers, but nevertheless some children understood the task in an unexpected way. In the choice task, the experimental procedure and instructions were the same as for adults, and it seemed that children followed them successfully. However, the qualitative analysis revealed that some of children’s mistakes were probably the result of their susceptibility to pragmatic characteristics of the task, instead of insufficient comprehension of the verbal aspect semantics. We will argue that any task with complex pragmatic properties and metalinguistic use of language is a prolific ground for children’s mistakes and that the following questions should be considered: are we as experimenters always sensitive to pre-schoolers' understanding of the pragmatics of our tasks, and to what extent is it allowed to adapt the task instructions and the procedure while ensuring that we are targeting the same phenomenon in pre-schoolers and adults.", publisher = "Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Novom Sadu", journal = "Current Trends in Psychology", title = "What can we learn from children's "mistakes"?", pages = "28-27", url = "https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_reff_4652" }
Savić, M., Anđelković, D.,& Popović, M.. (2017). What can we learn from children's "mistakes"?. in Current Trends in Psychology Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Novom Sadu., 27-28. https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_reff_4652
Savić M, Anđelković D, Popović M. What can we learn from children's "mistakes"?. in Current Trends in Psychology. 2017;:27-28. https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_reff_4652 .
Savić, Maja, Anđelković, Darinka, Popović, Maša, "What can we learn from children's "mistakes"?" in Current Trends in Psychology (2017):27-28, https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_reff_4652 .