Children's comprehension of contrastive connectives

Children's comprehension of contrastive connectives.

Production studies show connective acquisition by age 3;0, but comprehension studies show errors until 9;0 or older. To further investigate this gap, two comprehension tasks were carried out with 78 Dutch children between the ages of 7;0 and 10;1, testing contrastive maar 'but' and causal want 'because' connectives for comparison. An existing context choice task and a task that tested children'...

Disambiguating temporal-contrastive connectives for machine translation

Temporal–contrastive discourse connectives (although, while, since, etc.) signal various types of relations between clauses such as temporal, contrast, concession and cause. They are often ambiguous and therefore difficult to translate from one language to another. We discuss several new and translation-oriented experiments for the disambiguation of a specific subset of discourse connectives in...

Learning Contrastive Connectives in Sentence Realization Ranking

We look at the average frequency of contrastive connectives in the SPaRKy Restaurant Corpus with respect to realization ratings by human judges. We implement a discriminative n-gram ranker to model these ratings and analyze the resulting n-gram weights to determine if our ranker learns this distribution. Surprisingly, our ranker learns to avoid contrastive connectives. We look at possible expla...

Running head : PROCESSING AND COMPREHENSION OF CONNECTIVES

Connectives are cohesive devices that signal the relations between clauses and are critical to the construction of a coherent representation of a text’s meaning. We investigated young readers’ knowledge, processing, and comprehension of temporal, causal, and adversative connectives using off-line and on-line tasks. In a cloze task, 10-year-olds were more accurate than 8-year-olds on temporal an...

Young Children's Comprehension of Logical Connectives