SOCIAL MEANINGS AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Abstract
Experiments with children often involve different leveis of
meaning. At a surface levei, an adult talks with the child. At another levei,
the experimenter is someone to be obeyed, not talked with. In psycholinguistics,
these two leveis of meaning can be a source of confounding of
experimental results. This ambiguity is seen as a source of difficulty in the
interpetation of C. Chomsky's study on "ask" and "tell". In a regular conversation,
if A asks B to ask C somenthing, B will only ask the question if
he does not know the answer; if he knows the answer, he will simply say
it. In the experimental situation, B is to ask a question regardless of his
knowledge.
This experiment compared children's ability to respond approriately
to the "ask" commands under two conditions. Condition I was a replication
of Chomsky's experiment; in Condition II, children were instructed to take
the experimenter's comands literally by inserting the experiment into a
well-known game in which the experimenter played "The Queen".
Subjects were 30 children equally distributed in three age leveis (4,
5, and 6 years) randomly selected in one school in Recife, Brazil. As in
Chomsky's experiment, children were tested in the presence of a friend
and three leveis of syntactic complexity were explored.
A 3 (age-level) by 2 (condition) ANOVA with number of correct responses
to "ask" commands as the dependent variable showed significant main
effects of age and condition. At age 6 children showed systematic correct
responses to all three leveis of syntactic complexity in Condition II.
The previously observed difficulty of young children to distinguish
between "ask" and "tell" and the related effect of synctactic complexity
may have been a consequence of the ambiguity of the experimental situation
used. This experiment reinforces the need (already emphasized by
social psychologists, sociolinguists, and ethnomethodologists) for greater
attention to the social meanings in experiments.
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