Real-time interpretation of novel events across childhood

被引:22
|
作者
Borovsky, Arielle [1 ]
Sweeney, Kim [2 ]
Elman, Jeffrey L. [2 ]
Fernald, Anne [3 ]
机构
[1] Florida State Univ, Dept Psychol, Tallahassee, FL 32306 USA
[2] Univ Calif San Diego, Ctr Res Language, San Diego, CA 92103 USA
[3] Stanford Univ, Dept Psychol, Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA
基金
美国国家卫生研究院;
关键词
Sentence processing; Eye tracking; Event learning; Language development; SPOKEN-WORD RECOGNITION; SENTENCE INTERPRETATION; LANGUAGE; PREDICTION; CHILDREN; RECALL; REPRESENTATIONS; ORGANIZATION; KNOWLEDGE; MOVEMENTS;
D O I
10.1016/j.jml.2014.02.001
中图分类号
H0 [语言学];
学科分类号
030303 ; 0501 ; 050102 ;
摘要
Despite extensive evidence that adults and children rapidly integrate world knowledge to generate expectancies for upcoming language, little work has explored how this knowledge is initially acquired and used. We explore this question in 3- to 10-year-old children and adults by measuring the degree to which sentences depicting recently learned connections between agents, actions and objects lead to anticipatory eye-movements to the objects. Combinatory information in sentences about agent and action elicited anticipatory eyemovements to the Target object in adults and older children. Our findings suggest that adults and school-aged children can quickly activate information about recently exposed novel event relationships in real-time language processing. However, there were important developmental differences in the use of this knowledge. Adults and school-aged children used the sentential agent and action to predict the sentence final theme, while preschool children's fixations reflected a simple association to the currently spoken item. We consider several reasons for this developmental difference and possible extensions of this paradigm. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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页码:1 / 14
页数:14
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