Br. J . educ. Psychol, 47,322-326, 1977 ON PRESENTING PICTURES AND SENTENCES: THE EFFECT OF PRESENTATION ORDER ON SENTENCE COMPREHENSION IN NORMAL AND MENTALLY HANDICAPPED CHILDREN* By K . WHELDALL” and P. MITTLER (Hester Adrian Research Centre, University of Manchester) Thirty-nine normal pre-school and 48 older ESN(S) children of similar vocabulary age were tested on a sentence comprehension test under three different presentation conditions. The test requires the child to demonstrate his comprehension of spoken sentences by pointing appropriately to one of three or four alternative visual referents. In the first condition the pictures were presented prior to the stimulus sentence, in the second the pictures and sentence were presented simultaneously, and in the third the sentence was presented prior to the pictures. Presentation conditions did not affect performance significantly for normal children, but that of ESN(S) children was adversely affected by the condition in which sentenceswere presented prior to pictures. SUMMARY.
INTRODUCTION Many tests which require the testee to perform manipulations upon materials assume that failure to do so indicates inability to d o so. Incorrect responses, however, may arise as a result of failure to understand the instructions. Successful comprehension of instructions, moreover, may be heavily dependent upon test conditions, including the different orders of presentation of materials and instructions. In the Stanford Binet (Terman and Merrill, 1960), for example, three different presentation orders are included. ‘Comparison of Sticks’ requires the presentation of visual followed by verbal commands. This may be characterised as Visual/Auditory (VIA) presentation. Simultaneous (S) presentation of auditory and visual information is required in the subtest ‘Identifying Parts of the Body” whereas ‘Memory for Designs’ is dependent upon presentation conditions in which verbal instructions are presented prior to the visual material, Auditory/Visual presentation (A/V). It may be argued that it matters little, from a methodological point of view, which order of presentation is used, providing the order is specified and kept constant in all test administrations. It is important, however, in terms of psychological theory underlying the nature of comprehension and the models we construct of its operation; it is especially important to determine optimal conditions for comprehension when it is not comprehension in which we are primarily interested but another cognitive operation, the success of which is dependent upon successful comprehension of instructions. In the case of mentally handicapped children, whose receptive skills are more limited, it is particularly important to optimise the conditions for successful comprehension. The Sentence Comprehension Test (Hobsbaum and Mittler, 1971) used in this study adopts a simplified model of comprehension whereby the experience/environment or non-verbal referent of the verbal message is restricted to a choice of three or four visual referents providing alternative grammatical interpretations of the verbal input, of which only one fits the verbal message perfectly. Thus the child has to scan up to four pictures which differ from each other in only one essential aspect. At the same time the child has to analyse the verbal input and eventually match it to the appropriate pictorial referent. SCT thus provides a suitable means for examining the influence of varied presentation conditions on sentence comprehension. In comparing normal and mentally handicapped children at a similar level of receptive language development, we hypothesised: (a) that varying presentation conditions would be more likely to influence adversely the performance of the subnormal children; (b) that they would experience particular difficulty in the simultaneous condition, since this requires the child to carry out a simultaneous auditory and visual analysis and to relate what he has heard to what he has seen. *Now at Department of Educational Psychology, University of Birmingham
Research Notes
323
METHOD Sample The subjects consisted of 39 normal nursery school children (mean CA 4 years 5 months) and 48 severely educationally subnormal children attending special schools (mean CA 12 years 6 months). The mean EPVT vocabulary age of the nursery school children was 4 years 2 months (SD 6.90 months) which was not significantly different from that of the ESN(S) children (3 years 1 1 months, SD 7.45 months).
Design Both normal and ESN(S) children were selected on the basis of their vocabulary ages being within the range of the pre-school version of the EPVT (ie, 3 years to 4 years 11 months) and were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups, apart from ensuring an equal sex ratio. The three normal and three ESN(S) groups formed in this way were thus at a similar level of receptive vocabulary development insofar as their mean vocabulary ages were very similar. EPVT vocabulary age has previously been shown to correlate highly with Sentence Comprehension Test score (see Mittler et al, 1974). Each group was tested on the Sentence Comprehension Test in one of three differing procedural forms (detailed later). Materials The Sentence Comprehension Test consists of a booklet of black and white picture arrays and aims to provide data on the child’s ability t o demonstrate comprehension of sentences of gradually increasing length and complexity of structure. Research on the test so far is reported fully in Mittler et a/ (1974) and summarised in Wheldall (1976). In brief, the child’s task is to demonstrate his comprehension of a spoken sentence by correctly identifying which of three or four simultaneously presented pictures corresponds to a given spoken sentence. The pictorial referents are systematically varied to illustrate alternative grammatical interpretations. The test consists of 15 subtests, corresponding to sentence types of varying complexity and grammatical structures including comparatives and superlatives, past and future tenses, passives, negative, plurals, prepositions and embedded clauses. Each subtest comprises four different item sentences, identical in structure, so that a more reliable assessment is possible. If a child scores three or four items correct out of four, he is said to have passed the subtest, since the probability of doing so by chance is only 5 per cent. For reasons of testing time and economy, five subtests were employed, selected so as to sample the rangeof difficulty of the test, as follows: I Simple intransitive eg, The cat is sleeping I1 Simple transitive eg, The girl is cutting the cake 111 Simple intransitive plus adjective eg, The old man is reading IV Transitive including adjective, subject, verb and object eg, The fat lady is pushing the pram V Passive eg, The car is being pushed by the bus Procedure Rapport was established with each child prior to testing by means of six simple practice items (eg, Show me ‘the big chair’). This also ensured that the child knew what was required of him in the test situation. Each child was then given the five subtests in the same order as previously listed and in the procedural form appropriate to the experimental condition in which he was a subject. The procedural forms were characterised as following: Subtest 1 , ‘The cat is sleeping’. V I A Condition E: “Look”-presents pictorial array-(3 second delay)-“The cat is sleeping”- “Show me”. S responds. S Condition E: “Now”-presents pictorial array and says: “The cat is sleeping”-(3 second delay)-“Show me”. S responds.
Research Notes
324
A/VCondition E: “Listen, the cat is sleeping”’-(3 second delay)-presents pictorial array and says “Show me”. S responds. Note that “Look”, “Now” and “Listen” were used to direct the child’s attention to the start of each item. The three procedural forms serve as exaggerated models of the three testing situations previously described, in order to demonstrate the effect as clearly as possible. RESULTS An analysis of the data in terms of number of subtests passed, as previously defined, showed clearly the effects of presentation conditions on test performance. Table 1 shows the mean number of subtests passed for each group. TABLE 1 MEAN NUMBER OF SUBTESTS PASSED IN THE THREE PRESENTATION CONDITIONS FOR NORMAL AND ESN(S) CHILDREN.
I
I_
“”4 _
I _
Conditions S _
_I
I A’” _
Normal (N= 13 per group)
2.07
1.62
1.54
ESN(S) (N= 16 per group)
1.50
1.44
0.69
_
I
~
~
Research Notes
325
The decline in mean number of subtests passed over the three conditions suggests that delay may constitute the crucial distinction between the experimental conditions. This relates to Graham’s (1970) findings on sentence comprehension which utilised a procedure similar to that employed in SCT. The results of his experiments, in which testing was carried out using a form of the A/V presentation procedure, showed that STM was the most important factor influencing sentence comprehension in his sample of ESN(M) children. Alternatively, the present research may be taken as suggesting that Graham’s finding regarding the importance of STM in the sentence comprehension ability of ESN(M) children might be an artefact of the presentation condition employed. It might be argued that his A/V type procedure emphasised the STM aspects of the experimental paradigm. (b) If memory load alone were the principal factor involved, however, we would expect the results to decline steadily but significantly over the three conditions, whereas the V/A and S conditions were not shown t o exert significantly different effects for the ESN(S) group. Where, according to the theory we should have got A/V
INTRODUCTION Many tests which require the testee to perform manipulations upon materials assume that failure to do so indicates inability to d o so. Incorrect responses, however, may arise as a result of failure to understand the instructions. Successful comprehension of instructions, moreover, may be heavily dependent upon test conditions, including the different orders of presentation of materials and instructions. In the Stanford Binet (Terman and Merrill, 1960), for example, three different presentation orders are included. ‘Comparison of Sticks’ requires the presentation of visual followed by verbal commands. This may be characterised as Visual/Auditory (VIA) presentation. Simultaneous (S) presentation of auditory and visual information is required in the subtest ‘Identifying Parts of the Body” whereas ‘Memory for Designs’ is dependent upon presentation conditions in which verbal instructions are presented prior to the visual material, Auditory/Visual presentation (A/V). It may be argued that it matters little, from a methodological point of view, which order of presentation is used, providing the order is specified and kept constant in all test administrations. It is important, however, in terms of psychological theory underlying the nature of comprehension and the models we construct of its operation; it is especially important to determine optimal conditions for comprehension when it is not comprehension in which we are primarily interested but another cognitive operation, the success of which is dependent upon successful comprehension of instructions. In the case of mentally handicapped children, whose receptive skills are more limited, it is particularly important to optimise the conditions for successful comprehension. The Sentence Comprehension Test (Hobsbaum and Mittler, 1971) used in this study adopts a simplified model of comprehension whereby the experience/environment or non-verbal referent of the verbal message is restricted to a choice of three or four visual referents providing alternative grammatical interpretations of the verbal input, of which only one fits the verbal message perfectly. Thus the child has to scan up to four pictures which differ from each other in only one essential aspect. At the same time the child has to analyse the verbal input and eventually match it to the appropriate pictorial referent. SCT thus provides a suitable means for examining the influence of varied presentation conditions on sentence comprehension. In comparing normal and mentally handicapped children at a similar level of receptive language development, we hypothesised: (a) that varying presentation conditions would be more likely to influence adversely the performance of the subnormal children; (b) that they would experience particular difficulty in the simultaneous condition, since this requires the child to carry out a simultaneous auditory and visual analysis and to relate what he has heard to what he has seen. *Now at Department of Educational Psychology, University of Birmingham
Research Notes
323
METHOD Sample The subjects consisted of 39 normal nursery school children (mean CA 4 years 5 months) and 48 severely educationally subnormal children attending special schools (mean CA 12 years 6 months). The mean EPVT vocabulary age of the nursery school children was 4 years 2 months (SD 6.90 months) which was not significantly different from that of the ESN(S) children (3 years 1 1 months, SD 7.45 months).
Design Both normal and ESN(S) children were selected on the basis of their vocabulary ages being within the range of the pre-school version of the EPVT (ie, 3 years to 4 years 11 months) and were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups, apart from ensuring an equal sex ratio. The three normal and three ESN(S) groups formed in this way were thus at a similar level of receptive vocabulary development insofar as their mean vocabulary ages were very similar. EPVT vocabulary age has previously been shown to correlate highly with Sentence Comprehension Test score (see Mittler et al, 1974). Each group was tested on the Sentence Comprehension Test in one of three differing procedural forms (detailed later). Materials The Sentence Comprehension Test consists of a booklet of black and white picture arrays and aims to provide data on the child’s ability t o demonstrate comprehension of sentences of gradually increasing length and complexity of structure. Research on the test so far is reported fully in Mittler et a/ (1974) and summarised in Wheldall (1976). In brief, the child’s task is to demonstrate his comprehension of a spoken sentence by correctly identifying which of three or four simultaneously presented pictures corresponds to a given spoken sentence. The pictorial referents are systematically varied to illustrate alternative grammatical interpretations. The test consists of 15 subtests, corresponding to sentence types of varying complexity and grammatical structures including comparatives and superlatives, past and future tenses, passives, negative, plurals, prepositions and embedded clauses. Each subtest comprises four different item sentences, identical in structure, so that a more reliable assessment is possible. If a child scores three or four items correct out of four, he is said to have passed the subtest, since the probability of doing so by chance is only 5 per cent. For reasons of testing time and economy, five subtests were employed, selected so as to sample the rangeof difficulty of the test, as follows: I Simple intransitive eg, The cat is sleeping I1 Simple transitive eg, The girl is cutting the cake 111 Simple intransitive plus adjective eg, The old man is reading IV Transitive including adjective, subject, verb and object eg, The fat lady is pushing the pram V Passive eg, The car is being pushed by the bus Procedure Rapport was established with each child prior to testing by means of six simple practice items (eg, Show me ‘the big chair’). This also ensured that the child knew what was required of him in the test situation. Each child was then given the five subtests in the same order as previously listed and in the procedural form appropriate to the experimental condition in which he was a subject. The procedural forms were characterised as following: Subtest 1 , ‘The cat is sleeping’. V I A Condition E: “Look”-presents pictorial array-(3 second delay)-“The cat is sleeping”- “Show me”. S responds. S Condition E: “Now”-presents pictorial array and says: “The cat is sleeping”-(3 second delay)-“Show me”. S responds.
Research Notes
324
A/VCondition E: “Listen, the cat is sleeping”’-(3 second delay)-presents pictorial array and says “Show me”. S responds. Note that “Look”, “Now” and “Listen” were used to direct the child’s attention to the start of each item. The three procedural forms serve as exaggerated models of the three testing situations previously described, in order to demonstrate the effect as clearly as possible. RESULTS An analysis of the data in terms of number of subtests passed, as previously defined, showed clearly the effects of presentation conditions on test performance. Table 1 shows the mean number of subtests passed for each group. TABLE 1 MEAN NUMBER OF SUBTESTS PASSED IN THE THREE PRESENTATION CONDITIONS FOR NORMAL AND ESN(S) CHILDREN.
I
I_
“”4 _
I _
Conditions S _
_I
I A’” _
Normal (N= 13 per group)
2.07
1.62
1.54
ESN(S) (N= 16 per group)
1.50
1.44
0.69
_
I
~
~
Research Notes
325
The decline in mean number of subtests passed over the three conditions suggests that delay may constitute the crucial distinction between the experimental conditions. This relates to Graham’s (1970) findings on sentence comprehension which utilised a procedure similar to that employed in SCT. The results of his experiments, in which testing was carried out using a form of the A/V presentation procedure, showed that STM was the most important factor influencing sentence comprehension in his sample of ESN(M) children. Alternatively, the present research may be taken as suggesting that Graham’s finding regarding the importance of STM in the sentence comprehension ability of ESN(M) children might be an artefact of the presentation condition employed. It might be argued that his A/V type procedure emphasised the STM aspects of the experimental paradigm. (b) If memory load alone were the principal factor involved, however, we would expect the results to decline steadily but significantly over the three conditions, whereas the V/A and S conditions were not shown t o exert significantly different effects for the ESN(S) group. Where, according to the theory we should have got A/V
