What lurks beneath: Syntactic priming during language comprehension in preschoolers (and adults)
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Jesse Snedeker
Abstract
How do young children represent the structure of an utterance? Do they employ abstract syntactic categories? Or are their representations more concrete and lexically limited? Our recent work brings together the world-situated eye-gaze paradigm and syntactic priming to explore these questions. We begin by reviewing theories of syntactic development and describing previous studies of syntactic priming during children’s language production. Then we introduce our method for exploring priming during comprehension. Next we present a series of experiments on priming in adults, 4-year-olds and 3-year-olds. In each case the participants’ interpretation is influenced by the structure of prior utterances, even in the absence of lexical overlap. We conclude that young children (and adults) employ abstract syntactic representations during on-line sentence comprehension.
Abstract
How do young children represent the structure of an utterance? Do they employ abstract syntactic categories? Or are their representations more concrete and lexically limited? Our recent work brings together the world-situated eye-gaze paradigm and syntactic priming to explore these questions. We begin by reviewing theories of syntactic development and describing previous studies of syntactic priming during children’s language production. Then we introduce our method for exploring priming during comprehension. Next we present a series of experiments on priming in adults, 4-year-olds and 3-year-olds. In each case the participants’ interpretation is influenced by the structure of prior utterances, even in the absence of lexical overlap. We conclude that young children (and adults) employ abstract syntactic representations during on-line sentence comprehension.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- List of contributors xvii
- Behavioral methods for investigating morphological and syntactic processing in children 1
- Event-related brain potentials as a window to children's language processing 29
- Using eye movements as a developmental measure within psycholinguistics 73
- Looking while listening 97
- What lurks beneath: Syntactic priming during language comprehension in preschoolers (and adults) 137
- Language acquisition research. A peek at the past: A glimpse into the future 169
- Index 187
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- List of contributors xvii
- Behavioral methods for investigating morphological and syntactic processing in children 1
- Event-related brain potentials as a window to children's language processing 29
- Using eye movements as a developmental measure within psycholinguistics 73
- Looking while listening 97
- What lurks beneath: Syntactic priming during language comprehension in preschoolers (and adults) 137
- Language acquisition research. A peek at the past: A glimpse into the future 169
- Index 187
