The New and Given in Children's Comprehension of Presuppositive Negatives in Two Modes of Processing

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not children, grades 2, 4, and 6, make consistent use of the Given-New Strategy (cf. Haviland & Clark, 1974) in visually and aurally comprehending pre-suppositive negatives. Following de Boysson-Bardies' (1977) procedure of having children manifest their interpretation of the scope of the negative under different sentential definite-indefinite article conditions by graphically representing nonnegated subjects and/or objects, it was found that children tend to treat more information as Given when aurally processing than when visually processing. And conversely, children tend to treat more information as New when visually processing than when aurally processing. The significance of these findings are discussed in terms of ordinal and nominal interpretations of levels-of-processing.