3-169 - Whatever Next! Children’s Anticipation of Upcoming Spoken Language Input

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Children’s language processing prowess owes, in large part, to the fact that they are able to predict upcoming spoken language input which may make it easier for them to quickly integrate coherent words into a discourse context. This symposium brings together work examining the limits of children’s predictive language processing as a key to understanding the mechanisms underlying their anticipation of upcoming spoken language input.
Paper 1 shows that the strength of the associative relationship between two words influences the degree to which children generate expectancies about these words, whilst also finding a separable influence of children’s productive vocabulary in their predictive language processing. Paper 2 shows that while children generate expectancies about upcoming input, they quickly abandon these expectations in the face of contrasting input, i.e., children prioritise the content of the auditory signal over their expectations. Paper 3 shows that the constraints imposed by a number-marked function word, e.g., is or are, limit the range of acceptable continuations both grammatically (are triggers a search for grammatically plural nouns, e.g., scissors) and notionally (are triggers a search for multiple objects). Paper 4 shows that while listeners generate expectations based on the input thus far, they also consider less likely outcomes that are, nevertheless, consistent with local sentence-level cues, at least in typically developing populations (but not children with SLI). Taken together, the talks highlight the multiple mechanisms that simultaneously influence listeners’ anticipation of upcoming linguistic input.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Nivedita Mani, N/A

Individual Presentations

• “Pro-active” in Many Ways: Evidence for Multiple Mechanisms in Prediction - Presenting Author: Nivedita Mani, N/A; Moritz M Daum, University of Zürich; Falk Huettig, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

• The Semantic Garden Path Effect: Young Children’s Abandonment of Semantic Expectations - Presenting Author: Michael Brooks, Northwestern University; Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University

• Where are the scissors? Using verb agreement to anticipate grammatical and notional number - Presenting Author: Cynthia Lukyanenko, The Pennsylvania State University; Cynthia L Fisher, Univ of Illinois

• Children generate expectations for a multitude of outcomes in real-time sentence processing - Presenting Author: Arielle Borovsky, Florida State University