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Biomedical subjects

M Beveridge

Publications and source records attributed to M Beveridge.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1991

The influence of linguistic context on young children's understanding of homophonic words.

This study investigates young children's understanding of homophones in two different linguistic contexts. Research has shown that children interpret homophones according to their 'primary' sense even though this is inappropriate to the linguistic context. The present study investigates the influence of different contexts on their interpretations of homophones. A picture test, similar to the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS), was devised, depicting ten homophones in both their primary and secondary senses. Forty-eight children who were in matched pairs following the BPVS pre-test and whose ages ranged from three to six were asked to select the picture which showed the homophone, first when the homophone was in no linguistic context, and secondly following one of two conditions of the same story which differed according to the richness of context provided. Results showed that those children assigned to story B, the expanded version with full linguistic details and explanations of the words it contained, were more able to identify correctly the secondary meanings of the homophones intended than those children given story A, the unexpanded version. Analyses of variance showed both a significant age trend and a story-type effect. These results are interpreted as showing that the linguistic context is an important factor in young children's understanding of word meaning.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

Reading illustrated science texts: a micro-computer based investigation of children's strategies.

Research has shown that the effect of illustrations on children's learning of science is related to ability. This study examines the hypothesis that children who show different levels of success in a learning task will employ different strategies in their picture-text processing. One hundred and eighty 14 year-old children were required to learn three illustrated science topics of different levels of difficulty which were presented to them on a BBC micro-computer. The computer was programmed to record the time spent on each sentence and each picture, as well as the point in the text at which the picture was accessed. Post hoc testing enabled the children to be divided into six groups according to their success rates on the learning tasks. Significantly longer times were spent looking at the pictures as the topics increased in difficulty; also the amount of time spent looking at pictures increased as the learning of the children decreased. For every second the least successful children spent accessing pictures, they spent about four seconds reading the text; for the most successful children this ratio was about one-to-six. The least successful children also accessed the pictures significantly more frequently than the most successful. The different strategies used by the children are discussed in terms of what is known about their differential learning gains from illustrated texts.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1978

Language and social behaviour in severely educationally subnormal children.

There is a strong positive relationship between age and the number of social interactions a child is likely to initiate during a typical classroom free-play period. The type of interaction which shows the largest increase is verbally initiated child-child interactions. Verbally initiated child-teacher interactions also increase with age, though not so markedly as child-child interactions. There appears to be no significant change in non-verbal initiations of interactions with age, either to the teacher or to peers. These results give support to the use of observational techniques for language assessment in that they give further information about the growth of productive language skills as reported in a population survey of language abilities in mentally handicapped school children.

Adolescent↗