Geographies of children, youth and families: an international perspective

This edited collection brings together international experts from the vibrant and growing field of geographies of children, youth and families. The book provides an overview of current conceptual and theoretical debates, and gives a wide range of examples of cutting-edge research from a variety of national contexts across the globe. The theme of 'disentangling the socio-spatial contexts of young people and/or their families' advances debates in geographies and social studies of young people and families by emphasising the context of young people's social agency. The book is designed to provide an introduction to the topic of geographies of children, youth and families and is an invaluable course text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of geography and the social sciences. This interdisciplinary text is also of likely interest to students and practitioners of education, youth work, social policy and social work.

Participation in Higher Education: aspirations, attainment and social background

The recent report of the Milburn Review into Social Mobility highlights the under-representation of young people from lower socio-economic groups in higher education and encourages universities and others to act to remedy this situation as a contribution to greater social mobility. The paper uses data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England to examine the relationship between social background, attainment and university participation. The results show that differences in school-level attainment associated with social background are by far the most important explanation for social background differences in university attendance. However, there remains a small proportion of the participation gap that is not accounted for by attainment. It is also the case that early intentions for higher education participation are highly predictive of actual participation. The results suggest that although there may be some scope for universities to act to improve participation by people from less advantaged backgrounds, a much more important focus of action is on improving the school-level achievement of these students.

Children’s and adults��� processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences during reading

While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children’s syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults��� syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage’ in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such as, ‘I think I’ll wear the new skirt I bought tomorrow/yesterday. It’s really nice’ in which the attachment of an adverbial phrase was manipulated. Results showed that adults and children exhibited similar processing preferences, but that children were delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis. It is concluded that children and adults have the same sentence-parsing mechanism in place, but that it operates with a slightly different time course. In addition, the data support the hypothesis that the visual processing system develops at a different rate than the linguistic processing system in children.

Word length and landing position effects during reading in children and adults

The present study examined the effects of word length on children’s eye movement behaviour when other variables were carefully controlled. Importantly, the results showed that word length influenced children’s reading times and fixation positions on words. Furthermore, children exhibited stronger word length effects than adults in gaze durations and refixations. Adults and children generally did not differ in initial landing positions, but did differ in refixation behaviour. Overall, the results indicated that while adults and children show similar effects of word length for early measures of eye movement behaviour, differences emerge in later measures.

Visual information capture during fixations in reading for children and adults

Two experiments were undertaken to examine whether there is an age-related change in the speed with which readers can capture visual information during fixations in reading. Children’s and adults��� eye movements were recorded as they read sentences that were presented either normally or as “disappearing text”. The disappearing text manipulation had a surprisingly small effect on the children, inconsistent with the notion of an age-related change in the speed with which readers can capture visual information from the page. Instead, we suggest that differences between adults and children are related to the level of difficulty of the sentences for readers of different ages.

Children’s and Adults��� Processing of Anomaly and Implausibility during Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements

The eye movements of 24 children and 24 adults were monitored to compare how they read sentences containing plausible, implausible, and anomalous thematic relations. In the implausible condition the incongruity occurred due to the incompatibility of two objects involved in the event denoted by the main verb. In the anomalous condition the direct object of the verb was not a possible verb argument. Adults exhibited immediate disruption with the anomalous sentences as compared to the implausible sentences as indexed by longer gaze durations on the target word. Children exhibited the same pattern of effects as adults as far as the anomalous sentences were concerned, but exhibited delayed effects of implausibility. These data indicate that while children and adults are alike in their basic thematic assignment processes during reading, children may be delayed in the efficiency with which they are able to integrate pragmatic and real world knowledge into their discourse representation.