Search results for "Pluperfect"

Cognitive representations of predicates and the use of past tenses in French: a developmental approach

1997

Two experiments examine how French 10-year-old children and adults relate past tenses to the semantic properties of predicate types in writing. Experiment 1 involved two tasks: graphically coding two predicate dimensions (durativity and resultativity), a task designed to assess cognitive representations of these predicates; and selecting past tenses in sentences which included previously evaluated verbs. Results show that (a) 10-year-olds and adults have comparable representations of durativity, but different ones for resultativity, (b) the adults associate process charac teristics and past tenses, but 10-year-olds do not. In Experiment 2, subjects only had to code graphically two dimensio…