Effects of language and task on children's patterns of sentence verification and denial.

Japanese-speaking and English-speaking children differ in performance on sentence-verification and denial tasks (M. M. Akiyama, see PA, Vol 71:14618 and PA, Vol 72:16907). Although the Japanese and Korean languages are similar, Korean-speaking children performed like English speakers on such tasks. In Experiment 1, 32 monolingual Korean and 24 English speakers with a mean age of 4 years, 5 months were asked to respond "right" or "wrong" on a sentence–picture or a sentence–knowledge verification task. Both language groups found true negatives the hardest sentences to verify in both tasks. In Experiment 2, 16 Korean speakers aged 4–7 years were asked to deny statements. Like English speakers, they produced more affirmative denials than negative ones. The common performances of Korean-speaking and English speaking children were accounted for by considering differences in pragmatics and the types of negative constructions found in the 3 languages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)