Where are the cookies? Three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Lukyanenko, Cynthia

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fisher, Cynthia L.

• language acquisition
• comprehension
• sentence processing
• prediction
• subject-verb agreement
• number agreement
• eye-movements
• morphological development
• morphosyntax

Statement dc:rights

• copyright 2011 Cynthia Lukyanenko

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/24314

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/24314