SOCIAL MEANINGS AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

• Autor(a) principal: Carraher, Terezinha Nunes
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Spinillo, Alina Galvão
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Psicologia (Universidade de Brasília. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/revistaptp/article/view/17057

Experiments with children often involve different leveis ofmeaning. At a surface levei, an adult talks with the child. At another levei,the experimenter is someone to be obeyed, not talked with. In psycholinguistics,these two leveis of meaning can be a source of confounding ofexperimental results. This ambiguity is seen as a source of difficulty in theinterpetation of C. Chomsky's study on "ask" and "tell". In a regular conversation,if A asks B to ask C somenthing, B will only ask the question ifhe does not know the answer; if he knows the answer, he will simply sayit. In the experimental situation, B is to ask a question regardless of hisknowledge.This experiment compared children's ability to respond approriatelyto the "ask" commands under two conditions. Condition I was a replicationof Chomsky's experiment; in Condition II, children were instructed to takethe experimenter's comands literally by inserting the experiment into awell-known game in which the experimenter played "The Queen".Subjects were 30 children equally distributed in three age leveis (4,5, and 6 years) randomly selected in one school in Recife, Brazil. As inChomsky's experiment, children were tested in the presence of a friendand three leveis of syntactic complexity were explored.A 3 (age-level) by 2 (condition) ANOVA with number of correct responsesto "ask" commands as the dependent variable showed significant maineffects of age and condition. At age 6 children showed systematic correctresponses to all three leveis of syntactic complexity in Condition II.The previously observed difficulty of young children to distinguishbetween "ask" and "tell" and the related effect of synctactic complexitymay have been a consequence of the ambiguity of the experimental situationused. This experiment reinforces the need (already emphasized bysocial psychologists, sociolinguists, and ethnomethodologists) for greaterattention to the social meanings in experiments.