Date of Award

5-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

Psychology

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Laura Lakusta

Committee Member

Paul Muentener

Committee Member

Jason Dickinson

Abstract

In order to talk about mechanical support (e.g., girl adheres a picture to a box), children must not only represent the relevant components (actor, action, figure, spatial relation, ground) but also map them onto linguistic structures (e.g., NP, VP, NP, PP). Although research has explored how children linguistically encode states of mechanical support (picture adhering to box), little research has explored how children encode mechanical support events - representations that involve knowledge of event causality as well as states (the picture adheres to a box because the girl used an adhesive mechanism). The current study tests whether children 3-to 5-years of age linguistically encode the cause of mechanical support events (and if so, how), by presenting children with mechanical support events in contexts of inconsistency (e.g., the toy previously adhered to a box, but now it falls). The findings revealed that although most children encoded the cause in their explanations, the likelihood of encoding the cause of support increased over age. Further, as children aged, they also tended to explain the events by referring to the object category that changed ('It’s a not-a-toma now') - a type of causal explanation that the younger children did not use often. The results shed light on how children acquire the language of mechanical support events and raise questions for future research about why children’s mechanical support event language changes from 3 to 5.

File Format

PDF

Download

Share

COinS