McCormack and Hoerl's state of the art review of the development of temporal concepts from the end of infancy to the end of the fifth year shows that young children's conception of time is quite different from that of adults. Adults and 5-year-old children can construe an event from a range of temporal perspectives and can describe it from a…

Describes a study designed to explore the nature of early use of two forms of the perfect--the present perfect and the present perfect progressive--by children over three years old. Three factors were found to influence children's selective imitation and paraphrasing of the perfect: verb form, semantic sense of the perfect, and duration of the…

Reports on an experiment designed to identify how contextual information can influence children's performance on an experimental task involving temporal terms. It is concluded that contextual information results in a significant improvement only when such information can be used to satisfy presuppositions. (Author/CB)

A study of the acquisition of time-related grammatical forms in Hebrew-speaking children looked at three kinds of information: (1) relative frequency of occurrence of different verb forms at different ages; (2) the relationship between tense-marking on verbs and the semantics of verbs used at different ages, and (3) the use of time adverbs…

Possible developmental asynchrony in children with specific language impairment (SLI) was investigated by comparing the development of temporal expressions of past reference in two linguistic domains in three- to five-year-olds. Results of the SLI children's performance suggest direct evidence for asynchronous language development. (Contains 40…

This study focuses on the development of the ability to talk about events in time -- to specify occurrence in time with reference to the present as well as to locate events in time with reference to each other. The child's learning of how to mark the different kinds of relationships between two events is discussed. This study of current relevance…

Argues that the measures of content and style of maternal talk used by the Murray and Trevarthen (1986) study of temporal patterning during vocal engagements did not directly indicate the ways in which the behaviors of the partners (mothers and infants) were combined on a moment-to-moment basis. (Author/CB)

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago, February 1968. Appears in "The Florida FL Reporter special anthology issue, "Linguistic-Cultural Differences and American Education. (FWB)

Studies the perceptual relationship between temporal "before" and "after" and their spatial counterparts. Adults reported temporal "before" related to spatial "after" and temporal "after" related to spatial "before." Three-year old children better understood spatial "after" and spatial "before," suggesting a temporal/spatial semantic acquisition…

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…

Forty-five children drawn equally from nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade were administered a nonverbal imitation task, a production task, a comprehension task, and a verbal imitation task. The results of the four tasks support the Temporal Complexity Hypothesis, which states that the components of temporality--order among events (O),…

Investigation of two- to four-year-olds' (N=20) understanding of temporal terms indicated that children were more likely to understand sentences using simple tasks, materials, and commands than more complicated sentences used in previous research. (Author/CB)

Investigates the development of past tense expressions in the speech of children from 1.6 to 2.6. It is shown that this development depends crucially on the child's cognitive construction of the time dimension, as described by Piaget. (Author/RM)