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Reference time in child English and Polish

Aleksandra Pawlak

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland

Jessica S. Oehlrich

Richard M. Weist

State University of New York, at Fredonia, USA

The purpose of this research was to investigate the manner in which reference time becomes integrated into the child's emerging systems of temporal reference. The longitudinal data from six children learning English and six children learning Polish were analyzed within the period from about 1;6 to 5;0. The temporal reference within an event time and a reference time system was evaluated. Regarding reference time constructions, we traced the acquisition of the following terms: (1) English,when, then, before, after, yesterday, today and tomorrow, and (2) Polish,potem ‘then’,jak (simultaneous ‘when’),jak (sequential, ‘after’),przed ‘before’,po ‘after’,wczoraj ‘yesterday’,dzisiaj ‘today’ andjutro‘tomorrow’. Entrance into the reference time system followed entrance into the event time system by about one year, i.e., at about 3 years as contrasted with 2 years of age. Children learning English and Polish produced deictic mismatches between tense and adverbs while learning the meaning of ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’, and they made errors in the co-ordination of tenses in complex sentences. The error patterns that accompany the entrance into the reference time system demonstrate the importance of combining a theory of sentence processing with a theory of clause structure.

Key Words: Crosslinguistic • English/Polish • language acquisition • reference time • temporal reference

First Language, Vol. 26, No. 3, 281-297 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0142723706059447
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