Yesterday and tomorrow: Development of early understanding of the terms.

Abstract

Since young children talk mainly about present events, it is interesting to consider how they come to understand the meaning of such words as yesterday and tomorrow that refer to the nonobservable past and future. Acquisition of the meaning of linguistic forms is a gradual process. Research of the past decade has provided information and insight into many aspects of the acquisition process. A still unresolved issue is the relative importance of the child's interaction with his environment and of some partially predetermined unfolding of linguistic structure and knowledge. Werner (Note 1) assigned a primary role to the child's interaction with his environment and to the child's hypotheses about relations in his surroundings. Werner suggested that when young children first use the words yesterday and tomorrow, both terms seem to refer to a nonpresent time. He observed that initially the terms were used as if they were interchangeable in meaning. Such usage might have resulted from the children's primitive hypotheses about the existence of nonpresent times.