Two experiments were conducted to investigate how event representation might operate in preschool children's understanding of the temporal terms "before" and "after." The first study, involving 3- and 4-year-olds (a total of 16 of each age) varied the arbitrariness of event sequences. Sixteen stories, each containing five…

The natural sign language used by deaf children in Poland makes no distinction between present, future, and past tenses. Deaf pupils do not understand the notions of temporal sequence and duration of time intervals, and so are prevented from thinking of and planning for the future. The study with 15 deaf 12-year-old pupils and 15 deaf 14-year-old…

The "contextual hypothesis" of French and Brown (1977) concerning children's acquisition of temporal terms was tested. French and Brown claimed that it would be impossible for children to learn the meaning of temporal terms except by hearing them used in contexts where they referred to already known sequences, and further proposed that the terms…

The development of children's understanding of the permanence of various social roles was examined in 16 four- and 16 five-year-old children. A social role conservation battery consisting of 12 items on the permanence of self-identity, gender, child and sibling roles was given under three temporal conditions: the past (i.e., when you were a baby,…

This paper reports on a study that represents a new approach to understanding early and middle grade children's development of historical time awareness. The study sought to embed children's time awareness in a sociocultural framework, and to move beyond linguistic symbol systems to incorporate visual data sources. The researchers began with three…

This paper reports two experimental studies of the development of time, speed and distance concepts in children. In Experiment I subjects (12 in each of four age groups: 5-, 8-, 11-year-olds, and adults) were asked to judge which of two electric trains on parallel tracks went faster, for the longer distance, or for more time. Subject's knowledge…

Linguistic and cognitive competencies of preschoolers were revealed by interviewing them about routine activities. It was found that freeing preschoolers' speech from constraints inherent in talking about the immediate context results in their demonstrating control over a variety of language-related skills that are generally assumed to be beyond…

Every sentence conveys a temporal point of view through its aspectual meaning. This viewpoint arises through presenting a situation from a certain temporal perspective and indirectly classifying the situation as an exemplar of an idealized situation type. The information is conveyed by the aspectual categories of a language. This paper presents a…

In order to investigate elementary school students' understanding of historical time, this study conducted open-ended interviews with 58 children in kindergarten through sixth grade. The students were asked to place nine illustrations from various periods of American history in chronological order and to talk about the reasoning behind the order…

The paper presents an innovative approach to the future by examining the concept of time in the 20th century, the development of a sense of chronology, and the role of futures history through the process of "invention." The model is based on the Einsteinian theory of the relativity of time. The author suggests that learning a sense of chronology…

Sociological literature on careers reveals that there are four major approaches framing career study, i.e., developmental, objective-empirical, normative, and interactive perspectives. Analysis of these approaches points to an orienting conceptualization of career based on the core characteristics of centrality, duration, and public…

In order to investigate the hypothesis that the conceptualization of sequence precedes that of simultaneity in child development, and to explore the use of elicited imitation in studying lexical acquisition, 32 subjects between 3 and 5 years of age were asked to verbally imitate a list of sentences. The constructions combined simple and reverse…