Children's understanding of yesterday and tomorrow

Children’s understanding of temporal language is one indication of their understanding of time. This study used a picture-sentence matching paradigm to test children’s understanding of yesterday and tomorrow. Children viewed two pictures of an object with a visible change of state (e.g., a carved pumpkin and an intact pumpkin) while listening to a sentence indicating the time of the action (e.g., “I carved the pumpkin yesterday”). They were asked to select one picture that matched the sentences. In Experiment 1, 69 3- to 5-year-old children completed this task, which included 12 sentences referred to the past and 12 referred to the future. Results showed that children performed better with past sentences than they did with future, suggesting they understand the temporal relation between past and present better than that between future and present. In Experiment 2, 41 4- to 5-year-old children completed the same task but with sentences containing conflicting tense and temporal adverb (e.g., “I carved the pumpkin tomorrow”). Results showed that children tended to select pictures that were the outcome of actions, regardless of when the action occurs, indicating their bias toward outcomes in temporal judgment. In Experiment 3, 25 adults completed the same task in Experiment 2 via computer. Their temporal judgments were mainly based on temporal adverbs, providing a maturity reference for this inconsistent situation.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesby Meng Zhan