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Children’s processing of morphosyntactic and prosodic cues in overriding context-based hypotheses: an eye tracking study

  • Meghan E. Armstrong EMAIL logo , Llorenç Andreu , Núria Esteve-Gibert and Pilar Prieto
Published/Copyright: April 1, 2016
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Probus
From the journal Probus Volume 28 Issue 1

Abstract

This research explores children’s ability to integrate contextual and linguistic cues. Prior work has shown that children are not able to weigh contextual information in an adult-like way and that between the age of 4 and 6 they show difficulties in revising a hypothesis they have made based on early-arriving linguistic information in sentence processing. Therefore we considered children’s ability to confirm or override a context-based hypothesis based on linguistic information. Our objective in this study was to test (1) children’s (ages 4–6) ability to form a hypothesis based on contextual information, (2) their ability to override such a hypothesis based on linguistic information and (3) how children are able to use different types of linguistic cues (morphosyntactic versus prosodic) to confirm or override the initial hypothesis. Results from both offline (pointing) and online (eye tracking) tasks suggest that children in this age group indeed form hypotheses based on contextual information. Age effects were found regarding children’s ability to override these hypotheses. Overall, 4-year-olds were not shown to be able to override their hypotheses using linguistic information of interest. For 5- and 6-year-olds, it depended on the types of linguistic cues that were available to them. Children were better at using morphosyntactic cues to override an initial hypothesis than they were at using prosodic cues to do so. Our results suggest that children slowly develop the ability to override hypotheses based on early-arriving information, even when that information is extralinguistic and contextual. Children must learn to weight different types of cues in an adult-like way. This developmental period of learning to prioritize different cues in an adult-like way is consistent with a constraint-based model of learning.

Keywords: Intonation; prosody; L1 acquisition; eyetracking; Catalan

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Published Online: 2016-4-1
Published in Print: 2016-5-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. Introduction. Language acquisition and cognitive science at the crossroads
  4. Part 1. Bilingualism and language processing
  5. The representation of asymmetric grammatical gender systems in the bilingual mental lexicon
  6. Working memory capacity in L2 processing
  7. Part 2. The L1 prosody-pragmatics interface
  8. Children’s processing of morphosyntactic and prosodic cues in overriding context-based hypotheses: an eye tracking study
  9. Intonational phonology and politeness in L1 and L2 Spanish
  10. Part 3. The L1 discourse-syntax interface
  11. (Pseudo-)Relatives and prepositional infinitival constructions in the acquisition of European Portuguese
  12. Prototypical tense–aspect alignment and the tense deficit in the spontaneous speech of Spanish-speaking children with SLI
https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2016-0004
Keywords for this article
Intonation; prosody; L1 acquisition; eyetracking; Catalan

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. Introduction. Language acquisition and cognitive science at the crossroads
  4. Part 1. Bilingualism and language processing
  5. The representation of asymmetric grammatical gender systems in the bilingual mental lexicon
  6. Working memory capacity in L2 processing
  7. Part 2. The L1 prosody-pragmatics interface
  8. Children’s processing of morphosyntactic and prosodic cues in overriding context-based hypotheses: an eye tracking study
  9. Intonational phonology and politeness in L1 and L2 Spanish
  10. Part 3. The L1 discourse-syntax interface
  11. (Pseudo-)Relatives and prepositional infinitival constructions in the acquisition of European Portuguese
  12. Prototypical tense–aspect alignment and the tense deficit in the spontaneous speech of Spanish-speaking children with SLI
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