We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were…

An emergent debate surrounds the nature of language processing in bilingual children as an extension of broader questions about their morphosyntactic development in comparison to monolinguals, with the picture so far being nuanced. This paper adds to this debate by investigating the processing of morphosyntactically complex which-questions (e.g.,…

The present study investigated whether children's difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin…

Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds' real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to "SVO" or "OVS" sentences containing active…

We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they…

Substantial individual differences exist in regard to type and amount of experience with variable speech resulting from foreign or regional accents. Whereas prior experience helps with processing familiar accents, research on how experience with accented speech affects processing of unfamiliar accents is inconclusive, ranging from perceptual…

In this paper we investigated the real-time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we monitored children's eye-movements while processing a sentence with modal expressions of different force ("might/must"). Children were also asked to judge the truth-value of the target sentences at the end of…

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences affect semantic prediction. We assessed this by looking at two languages, Dutch and Turkish, that differ in word order and thus vary in how words come together to create sentence meaning. In an eye-tracking task, Dutch and Turkish four-year-olds (N = 40), five-year-olds (N = 58), and…

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and "wh"-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and…

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…

Children up to school age have been reported to perform poorly when interpreting sentences containing restrictive and additive focus particles by treating sentences with a focus particle in the same way as sentences without it. Careful comparisons between results of previous studies indicate that this phenomenon is less pronounced for restrictive…

This study investigates three- to five-year-old children's interpretation of disjunction in sentences like "The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or the bunny". English disjunction has a conjunctive interpretation in such sentences ("The dog reached the finish line before the turtle and before the bunny"). This interpretation conforms…

Dutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use…

In this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it…