Where are the cookies? Three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns
Lukyanenko, Cynthia
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/24314
Description
Title
Where are the cookies? Three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns
Author(s)
Lukyanenko, Cynthia
Issue Date
2011-05-25T15:08:22Z
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Fisher, Cynthia L.
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
language acquisition
comprehension
sentence processing
prediction
subject-verb agreement
number agreement
eye-movements
morphological development
morphosyntax
Abstract
This study examines the development of incremental parsing processes in language comprehension by testing 3-year-olds' use of a particular morphosyntactic dependency: number agreement between a subject and verb in English. Using a looking-while-listening paradigm, we show not only that children make use of this dependency during online comprehension, but also that children use it predictively to anticipate the number features of an upcoming noun. Children were both faster and more likely to switch gaze away from a mismatching distractor picture when they heard an informative agreeing verb (is/are). This is both one of the earliest demonstrations that children are able to use verb agreement alone as a cue to the semantic number of the subject, and one of the first pieces of evidence that children engage in predictive processing of language.
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