acquisition of opposition

[Barbara Zurer Pearson]

Dear Lesley,

This is not the answer to your query, but you (or someone who has an 
answer for you closer to your topic) might be interested in the 
Semantics section of the DELV (Diagnostic Evaluation of Linguistic 
Variation), by Seymour, Roeper & de Villiers (2005).  There is a 
subtest which is based on children's developing capacity to make a more 
and more fine-tuned contrast set (elicited by a picture):  "he's not 
walking, he's _____"(crawling); then about the same picture, "he's not 
going UP the steps, he's going _______"(down) the steps; or another 
picture:  she's not sitting ON the chair, she's sitting ______ (under) 
the chair, etc.

The test is for 4 to 9 year olds--and the skill develops over that age 
range (and no doubt, before that range).  One could use the test to 
explore the question--or Kristen Asplin (with Jill de Villiers, Laura 
Wagner, and me) is looking at the pilot data on over a 1000 children, 
with no conclusions yet.  Stay tuned!

Best,
Barbara Pearson


On Jan 15, 2007, at 8:23 AM, Alison Crutchley wrote:

>
> Dear all
>
> I'm posting the request below on behalf of my English Language
> colleague, Lesley Jeffries (l.jeffries at hud.ac.uk). She hasn't been able
> to find any work on the acquisition of opposites and I felt sure that 
> if
> anyone knew, it would be the info-childes list! Many thanks for any
> ideas. Alison
>
> "I am writing a book on unconventional opposites as created in
> particular contexts - such as the news, poetry etc., and I keep coming
> up against the question of to what extent the conventional opposites
> (good-bad, tall-short etc) are in some sense deeply psychologically
> embedded. I also have only anecdotal evidence to point to the 
> assumption
> that children have to be taught about opposites - rather than the whole
> idea of opposites being something innate. Whilst I have done some
> library searching, I have not been able to turn up anything explicitly
> investigating either the process or chronology of 
> opposition-acquisition
> or the cognitive-related issues such as whether there is a stage at
> which opposites may more easily be acquired. Is anybody able to point 
> me
> towards research of this kind? If not, perhaps there is a project out
> there waiting to be done?
>
> Thanks!
> Lesley"
>
>
>
*****************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D
Research Associate, Project Manager
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA 01003

Tel: 413.545.5023

bpearson at research.umass.edu
http://www.umass.edu/aae/