Judith A. Becker

Body image dissatisfaction in preadolescent children

Abstract This study was designed to explore preadolescent childrens body image dissatisfaction and to identify psychometrically sound measures of dissatisfaction for this population. Participants were 109 male and 95 female elementary school students ranging from 8 to 10 years of age. Children completed Child Figure Drawings, a revised version of the Body Dissatisfaction scale of the Eating Disorder Inventory (Revised EDI-BD), Anxiety and Happiness and Satisfaction subscales of the Piers-Harris Childrens Self-Concept Scale, and the Childrens Depression Inventory (CDI), and each childs gender, race, height, and weight were also recorded. The Child Figure Drawings and the Revised EDI-BD were readministered after 2 to 3 weeks. The Revised EDI-BD emerged as a psychometrically sound measure of body dissatisfaction within this age range. Girls demonstrated significantly higher levels of body dissatisfaction and lower levels of self-esteem than boys. The results are discussed in terms of the development and implications of body dissatisfaction in preadolescent children.

Semantic restrictions on children's passives☆

Abstract Four studies are described in which children were asked to comprehend physical action passives such as Superman was held by Batman and mental verb passives such as Goofy was liked by Donald. Over a variety of comprehension methods, including questions in response to spoken sentences alone, or in choices of different pictures, children were found to be consistently poorer in comprehending the mental verb passives. Absolute competence could not be estimated securely because of variations in level of accuracy induced by different methods. But it appeared to be a reasonable interpretation that mental verb passives are understood very poorly at an absolute level by preschool children and many early grade school children, and are not understood as well as action verb passives until well into the grade school years. This is so despite the fact that both action and mental verb passives can be described uniformly at the level of the underlying grammatical relations, subject and object. Possibilities for explaining these limitations are discussed. It is concluded that it is not likely the children lack constructs such as subject, verb, and object. Rather, the limitations on the passive seem to arise from childrens active construal of input as indicating semantic conditions on the applicability of the passive.

The influence of pragmatic competence on the likeability of grade-school children

Previous research and theory suggest that effective use of specific pragmatic behaviors is important to social competence in children. The present study is the first attempt to examine the impact four pragmatic skills have on likeability using experimental methodology. Ninety‐one popular and less popular 10‐year‐old girls listened to one of five audiotaped scenarios in which a girl used four different pragmatic skills (requesting, turn‐taking, responding promptly when spoken to, and maintaining the logic of the conversation) either appropriately or inappropriately in a conversation with a school librarian. Subjects rated how much they would like to play with the girl and also described her in terms of attractiveness, school ability, and popularity. Subjects saw the girl as more likeable when she displayed pragmatic competence than when she requested inappropriately, F(1, 33) = 47.86, p<.001; interrupted, F(1, 33) = 13.56, p<.001; and failed to maintain the logic of the conversation, F(1, 31) = 5.90, p<.05...

Pragmatic Socialization: Parental Input to Preschoolers.

Little is known about parents’ pragmatic input and the ways it contributes to preschoolers’ acquisition of pragmatic competence. In order to address this issue, five families with preschoolers were asked to audiotape everyday family interactions over the course of one year. Parents provided a great deal of input about 15 different behaviors that included both pragmatic phrases and more abstract discourse skills. Input fell into 13 different categories. It typically addressed childrens errors and omissions and was indirect. The results replicate and extend previous research and offer insights into preschoolers’ acquisition of pragmatic competence. It is suggested that parental input provides rich information about pragmatic behaviors and conventions, that indirectness forces children to generate appropriate responses, and that children play an active role in the acquisition process.

'Sneak-shoes', 'sworders' and 'nose-beards': a case study of lexical innovation

Children often invent new words to express meanings for which they have learned no words or cannot recall conventional words. They do not do so randomly, but appear to utilize their knowledge of word-formation devices. The present study investigated the development of spontaneous lexical innovations during the preschool years. Instances of lexical innovations were identified in transcripts of 210 naturalistic conversations between an American English-speaking boy (2;4 through 5;0) and his parents. The boys innovations generally support and extend Clarks findings regarding categories of innovations and provide some support for her developmental predictions based on the principle of simplicity. Many usages seem to be based on common, productive word-formation devices in English, particularly compounding, whereas others appear to be based on novel rules and language play. Various influences on the development of lexical innovation are discussed.

The interactive effects of request form and speaker status on judgments of requests

The interactive effects of request form and speaker status on judgments of requests were investigated in a laboratory study of metapragmatics. College students (N=132) read scenarios in which speakers made requests of them. Speakers were higher in status, peers, or lower in status than the subjects, and the requests were imperatives with semantic aggravators, embedded imperatives, or permission directives with semantic softeners. Subjects rated the speakers with respect to how rude/polite, humble/arrogant, and powerful/weak they were being. Significant interactions were obtained for the first two ratings, indicating that the speaker status effect was stronger with permission directives than with the other requests. These findings suggest that listeners view unexpectedly indirect requests as more impolite and sarcastic than requests used in other situations and, more generally, that language meaning is a function of both form and context.

“I can't talk, I'm dead”: Preschoolers' spontaneous metapragmatic comments

Childrens pragmatic development can be revealed in both their use of pragmatic skills and their metapragmatic comments. Six families with preschoolers (mean age: 3 years, 3 months) were observed in unstructured, conversational interactions for about a year. Conversations were transcribed, and 65 instances of spontaneous metapragmatic comments were identified. Five types of comments were observed: comments about other peoples pragmatic errors, comments and questions about pragmatic rules, comments to regulate and maintain the conversation, self‐promptings of pragmatic behaviors, and accounts for pragmatic errors by reference to conflicting pragmatic rules. These comments make it clear that preschoolers can not only work to make conversations smoother and more effective, but also take an active role in testing and expanding their pragmatic understanding. The comments also reflect more sophisticated pragmatic knowledge than laboratory studies have revealed.

Implications of Ethology for the Study of Pragmatic Development

Both of these samples come from the speech of a 10-year-old girl. In the first, she is pretending to speak on the telephone to a new male teacher in her school and is asking to borrow an eraser from him. In the second, she is pretending to talk to the 3-year-old sister of a friend and is asking the little girl to return a book she took without asking.

Balanced incomplete blocks to control individual differences

Balanced incomplete block designs are used when there are reasons that preclude the use of repeated measurements designs, particularly when there are at least two factors, each with several levels. However, these designs are usually not used when interaction effects are of interest, because they involve the confounding of the interactions with subject or group differences. This paper describes special computational procedures that can be employed to obtain partial, but unconfounded, information about interaction effects.