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Twice Upon a Time: Children Use Syntax to Learn the Meanings of Yesterday and Tomorrow
Urvi Maheshwari1, David Barner1
1Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, USA.
Abstract:
Time words like "yesterday" and "tomorrow" are abstract, and are interpreted relative to the context in which they are produced: the word "tomorrow" refers to a different point in time now than in 24 h. We tested 112 three- to five-year-old English- and Hindi-speaking children on their knowledge of "yesterday" and "tomorrow," which are represented by the same word in Hindi-Urdu: "kal." We found that Hindi learners performed better than English learners when tested on actual past and future events, but that performance for hypothetical events was poor for both groups. Compatible with a "syntactic cues" account, we conclude that syntactic tense information-which is necessary for differentiating "yesterday" from "tomorrow" in Hindi-may play a stronger role in learning the deictic status of these words than mapping of specific words to particular past and future events ("event mapping").
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