Integrating Morphosyntactic and Discourse Cues to Process Sentences: Insights from Turkish, Cantonese, and English

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Sentence processing is an immensely difficult task, it involves transforming the acoustic input into a phonological representation, identifying the words that are spoken, and integrating the words into a structured syntactic representation, and then determining what the speaker intends to convey (Snedeker, 2013). There are ample studies on the influence of morphosyntactic cues on young children’s processing of complex sentences (e.g., animacy of noun phrases and types of noun phrases used; Kidd et al., 2007; Macdonald et al., 2020). Yet, many of these studies did not take into account the influence of discourse context (i.e., focus, givenness, and topic). This symposium brings together three talks with data on three different languages to provide insights into how young children integrate morphosyntactic and discourse cues to process sentences. The first talk will present Turkish data on how preschool children make use of causal and concessive connectives to construct a representation of the on-going discourse and predict up-coming content. The second talk will discuss how animacy of noun phrases and focus of the discourse influence Cantonese-speaking children’s production of relative clauses. The third talk will focus on English corpus data and examine the morphosyntactic and discourse-level characteristics of the noun phrases in different types of relative clauses in child-direct and child speech. Together, these presentations will shed light on how discourse context and expectations influence young children’s processing of complex sentences and how this changes across development.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Kin Chung Jacky Chan, Lancaster University

Discussant

• Chien-Jer Charles Lin

Individual Presentations

• Preschool Children Incrementally Interpret Causal and Concessive Connectives - Presenting Author: Özge Günay; Duygu Özge

• How Adults and Children Produce Relative Clauses when Animacy and Thematic Role Expectations Clash - Presenting Author: Elaine Lau

• Putting Lexical Cues into Discourse: Corpus Study of Relative Clauses in Child-Directed and Child Speech - Presenting Author: Kin Chung Jacky Chan, Lancaster University; Anna Theakston, University of Manchester; Silke Brandt