Poster #109 - Inhibitory Control and Receptive Vocabulary Affect Children's Access to Aspectual Interpretations

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Young children’s language errors have often been attributed to problems with performance (as opposed to competence) but few studies have identified the specific neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie specific linguistic performance problems. This study investigated children’s understanding of aspectual combinations and how it was linked to key neurocognitive tasks.
Previous work has documented a cross-linguistically robust under-extension in children’s language such that they preferentially produce and show better understanding of telic predicates (which describe events with inherent boundary points) with perfective marking and atelic predicates (which describe events with no specified boundary points) with imperfective marking (Bloom et al. 1980; Shirai & Andersen, 1995; Wagner, 2009). That is, children prefer The girl picked the flower (telic + perfective) over The girl was picking the flower (telic + imperfective) and they prefer The girl was listening to music (atelic + imperfective) over The girl listened to music (atelic + perfective). It has been argued that the preferred “prototypical” combinations are “easier” to process than the “non-prototypical” ones. The goal of this study was to be specific about the sense in which these combinations are easy, and to investigate whether specific neurocognitive strengths would affect performance on specific linguistic combinations.
Participants included 5-year-old’s (M = 5.8 years, N = 32) and adults (N = 32). All were tested on a forced-choice aspect comprehension task (16 items) in which an orally presented sentence (perfective or imperfective) was to be matched to a picture showing the completed version of an event (the perfective match) or the on-going version of the same event (the imperfective match). Items were fully counterbalanced for telic/atelic and perfective/imperfective such that participants saw equal numbers of prototypical and non-prototypical items. Both accuracy and reaction times were recorded. After the aspect task, participants completed four neurocognitive tasks targeting different dimensions of the aspect task: a visual comparison task assessed the ability to notice small differences between the pictures; two executive function tasks (Flanker and DCCS) assessed the ability to switch between more and less dominant interpretations of the lexical predicates; and a picture vocabulary test assessed general depth of linguistic knowledge.
The results replicated previous work showing that children (but not adults) were more accurate on the prototypical than non-prototypical aspectual combinations (children: F(31) = 14.36, p < 0.001), despite a baseline preference (and speeded responses) for choosing the on-going pictures. Regression analyses also showed that for children, inhibitory control (Flanker task) predicted success (p < 0.041) at interpreting telic + imperfective combinations (The girl was picking a flower), which require children to block the entailments of the predicate; in contrast, receptive vocabulary predicted children’s success (p < 0.011) with atelic + perfective combinations (The girl listened to music), which require children to draw on background knowledge to identify a plausible ending (Figures 1 and 2).
These results demonstrate how language performance is guided by neurocognitive abilities in a specific way and how different dimensions of linguistic interpretation draw on different neurocognitive skills.

Authors

• Andrew Blank, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rachael Frush Holt, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laura Wagner, Ohio State University
  Presenting Author