Naslov
Understanding negative sentences: a comparison between English and Croatian preschool children

Autori
Lukin, Helena

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Ocjenski radovi, diplomski rad, diplomski

Fakultet
Filozofski fakultet

Mjesto
Zagreb

Datum
25.05

Godina
2022

Stranica
39

Mentor
Zovko Dinković, Irena

Ključne riječi
double negation, negative concord, preschool children, acquisition, Croatian, English

Sažetak
“No” is one of the first and most important words children learn to say and yet, little is known about their ability to comprehend and produce negative sentences even though negation is one of the fundamental features of human language structure. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to explore English and Croatian preschool children’s ability to understand simple, as well as complex negative sentences. In order to study this, an experiment was conducted with ten Croatian preschool children between the ages of 3 and 6 ; 5 as participants. They were divided into two groups of five: in the first group were the children between the ages of 3 and 4 and in the second group were the children between the ages of 4 ; 5 and 6 ; 5. After looking at pictures and hearing several stories, they were presented with an array of different negative sentences, some grammatically correct and some incorrect. The children in the second group showed significant progress in the comprehension of complex negative sentences. They also needed less time to understand the meaning of sentences and provide an answer regardless of the fact that they were sometimes wrong. On the other hand, the children in the first group effortlessly understood simple negative sentences but complex structures were almost completely incomprehensible to them. The experiment was then compared to the research by Thornton et al. (2016) involving 24 English preschool children in the same age group. The comparison between these two languages is intriguing because they have very different systems of negation. English is a Double Negation language, which means that multiple negative markers in a single sentence cancel each other out and result in affirmative meaning, while Croatian is a Negative Concord language, which means that multiple negative markers in a single sentence result in a single logical negation. Nevertheless, the data show that, even though there are fundamental differences between these two negative systems, the children’s responses were quite similar in nature. Both English and Croatian children struggled to understand negative sentences in which there were multiple negative markers and they often assigned wrong interpretations to them. Our findings suggest that children start acquiring negation in a similar fashion, regardless of their linguistic background, and it is only after being exposed to the language-specific negative forms that they start understanding and implementing them in their speech.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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