Children’s Understanding of Antonymy

Phillips, Catherine

Children’s Understanding of Antonymy

atmire.migration.oldid	1373
dc.contributor.advisor	Pexman, Penny
dc.contributor.author	Phillips, Catherine
dc.date.accessioned	2013-09-13T20:43:22Z
dc.date.available	2013-11-12T08:00:17Z
dc.date.issued	2013-09-13
dc.date.submitted	2013	en
dc.description.abstract	Understanding antonymy (the opposite meaning relationship between certain words) is an important conceptual development that likely supports, and is itself supported by, the acquisition of other skills. The purpose of the present research was three-fold: to determine the development of understanding for the concept of antonymy with a novel, less verbal task than used in previous research; to determine whether there are other cognitive developments related to the development of the concept of antonymy; and to evaluate whether there was evidence of a sensitivity to, or an implicit understanding of, the concept of antonymy prior to behavioural evidence of understanding. Results showed that children’s accuracy on the opposite appreciation task improved with age. Furthermore, 4- and 5-year-old children performed significantly above chance, whereas 3-year-old children did not. Children’s performance was correlated with the context subscale of the CCC-2; children who performed better on the Opposite task also tended to be perceived as making use of context to understand language. Children whose parents reported having books or games that are focused on opposites were more likely to perform above chance than were those who did not have access to these materials in the home. Children’s performance on the opposite task was not correlated with receptive vocabulary or working memory. Eye gaze, response latency and item differences on the opposite task did not provide evidence for latent understanding of the concept of antonymy. Overall, children were significantly more accurate for the word pair big – small than the word pair awake – asleep. However, 3-year-old children did not perform above chance on the word pair for which they displayed the best performance. Eye gaze analyses did not provide any evidence for latent understanding of the concept of opposites in 3-year-old children. These results suggest that 4- and 5-year-old children, but not 3-year-old children, show an appreciation for the antonymy relationship, and that this appreciation generalizes to a number of different antonym pairs. Furthermore, children demonstrate this appreciation only when the label “opposite” is used in the task, suggesting that antonymy is not a relationship made salient by stimulus properties alone.	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Phillips, C. (2013). Children’s Understanding of Antonymy (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25320	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/25320
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/11023/963
dc.language.iso	eng
dc.publisher.faculty	Graduate Studies
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary	en
dc.publisher.place	Calgary	en
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subject	Cognitive
dc.subject	Developmental
dc.subject	Experimental
dc.subject.classification	Child development	en_US
dc.subject.classification	concept formation	en_US
dc.subject.classification	antonyms	en_US
dc.title	Children’s Understanding of Antonymy
dc.type	doctoral thesis
thesis.degree.discipline	Psychology
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary
thesis.degree.name	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
ucalgary.item.requestcopy	true