De relatie tussen het temperament van jonge kinderen en taalverwerving.

Abstract

This study tests whether temperament influences language acquisition. Infants of 18 months old are observed during a familiarization phase. In an experiment using the head-turn preference procedure, the infants hear one of two artificial languages, which are used to test implicit sequential learning. At test, children can show either a novelty preference (a preference for ‘ungrammatical’ sentences) or a familiarity preference (a preference for ‘grammatical’ sentences). We investigated whether the child’s behavior during the preceding familiarization phase (e.g. playing behaviour, clinging to their mother) was related to the results in the test phase. Results show that infants who are scored as ‘busy’ and show more motor activity and make more utterances, are more likely to show a novelty preference. A novelty effect is also seen when children are more passive (like looking at a television screen). Infants who spend more time on their parent’s lap and looking at a television screen during the familiarization phase are not as good at discriminating the two languages as their peers. The implications on these findings in relation to temperament are discussed.