ERIC Number: EJ1486851
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Nov
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: EISSN-1469-7602
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Relative Contributions of Predictive vs. Associative Processes to Infant Looking Behavior during Language Comprehension
Tracy E. Reuter1; Lauren L. Emberson1,2
Journal of Child Language, v52 n6 p1225-1248 2025
Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to semantic-relatedness to differentiate associative vs. predictive processes, the present study used eye-tracking to begin to disentangle the contributions of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms to infants' real-time language processing. Replicating prior results, infants (14-19 months old) use successive semantically-related words across sentences (e.g., "eat," "yum," "mouth") to predict upcoming nouns (e.g., "cookie"). However, we also provide evidence that using successive semantically-related words to predict is distinct from the bottom-up activation of the word itself. In a second experiment, we investigate the potential effects of repetition on the findings. This work is the first to reveal that infant language comprehension is affected by both associative and predictive processes.
Descriptors: Child Language, Infants, Language Processing, Language Acquisition, Eye Movements, Semantics, Comprehension, Priming, Associative Learning, Prediction
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Princeton University, USA; 2University of British Columbia, Canada

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