Categories: uncategorized
Date: 15 April 2005 16:58:04
A very short week but I feel I need a weekend already...
Managed to get rid of some of the paperwork, my in-tray is now in less danger of toppling over. Also recoded some data a student collected as part of a project (how she managed to analyse it is beyond me, given the coding she'd given it). The results look interesting... but I won't bore you with them.
Oh all right then. Children who are learning to speak English rarely use the passive ("John was kissed by Mary") before the age of about 6 or 7 but we gave children aged 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 picture books to take home and got Mum to read the stories, half of which were in the passive, every day for a week. The ones who heard the passive stories produced passive sentences more when we asked them to read the stories in the lab. Conclusion: Children are ready to use the passive much earlier than they have been supposed to be previously.
Strangely it hasn't rained all day, despite dire weather forecasts this morning, and I am planning to go home very soon, while it still isn't raining.
Currently reading: The Subtle Knife, the second of the Northern Lights trilogy. I like it, though it's not as gripping as the first one. People say the series is very anti-religious but if that's its aim, it's not nearly as cutting as it might have set out to be..