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• New ERP method to study children's language comprehension in naturalistic context. • Child and adult N400 responses reflect word predictability given the context. • Like adults, child N400s in a connected discourse are not modulated by frequency. • ERP responses to low frequency words show a prolonged anterior negativity. • Results show top-down cues play a substantial role in children's lexical processes. When listening to speech, adults rely on context to anticipate upcoming words. Evidence for this comes from studies demonstrating that the N400, an event-related potential (ERP) that indexes ease of lexical-semantic processing, is influenced by the predictability of a word in context. We know far less about the role of context in children's speech comprehension. The present study explored lexical processing in adults and 5–10-year-old children as they listened to a story. ERPs time-locked to the onset of every word were recorded. Each content word was coded for frequency, semantic association, and predictability. In both children and adults, N400s reflect word predictability, even when controlling for frequency and semantic association. These findings suggest that both adults and children use top-down constraints from context to anticipate upcoming words when listening to stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.09.001 Byline: Yi Ting Huang, Jesse Snedeker Keywords: Semantics; Pragmatics; Scalar implicature; Quantifiers Abstract: Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants' eye movements during commands like 'Point to the girl that has some of the socks' in the presence of a display in which one girl had two of four socks and another had three of three soccer balls. These utterances contained an initial period of ambiguity in which the semantics of some was compatible with both characters. This ambiguity could be immediately resolved by a pragmatic implicature which would restrict some to a proper subset. Instead in Experiments 1 and 2, we found that participants were substantially delayed, suggesting a lag between semantic and pragmatic processing. In Experiment 3, we examined interpretations of some when competitors were inconsistent with the semantics (girl with socks vs. girl with no socks). We found quick resolution of the target, suggesting that previous delays were specifically linked to pragmatic analysis. Author Affiliation: Department of Psychology, William James Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Article History: Accepted 2 September 2008

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.08.001 Byline: Jesse Snedeker (a), Sylvia Yuan (b) Keywords: Modularity; Parsing; Prosody; Syntactic ambiguity resolution; Children's language comprehension; Eye movements Abstract: Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89-134; Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology, 49(3), 238-299]. This pattern is consistent with either a modular parsing system driven by stored lexical information or an interactive system which has yet to acquire low-validity referential constraints. In two experiments we explored whether children could use a third constraint -- prosody -- to resolve globally ambiguous prepositional-phrase attachments ('You can feel the frog with the feather'). Four to six-year-olds and adults were tested using the visual world paradigm. In both groups the fixation patterns were influenced by lexical cues by around 200ms after the onset of the critical PP-object noun ('feather'). In adults the prosody manipulation had an effect in this early time window. In children the effect of prosody was delayed by approximately 500ms. The effects of lexical and prosodic cues were roughly additive: prosody influenced the interpretation of utterances with strong lexical cues and lexical information had an effect on utterances with strong prosodic cues. We conclude that young children, like adults, can rapidly use both of these information sources to resolve structural ambiguities. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 1136 William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA (b) Psychology Department, University of Illinois, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA Article History: Received 14 July 2006; Revised 17 July 2007 Article Note: (footnote) [star] These experiments grew out of an earlier collaboration with John Trueswell and an idle comment made by Jim Morgan. We are grateful to Isabel Martin, Dina Roumiansteva, Julie Seet, Elaine Chung, and Mahvash Malik for their assistance with the eye-movement studies, which were supported by Harvard University. We thank Stacey Rubin, Sarah Brown-Schmidt, and Jared Novick for their assistance with the referential communication experiment, which was supported by an NIH grant to John Trueswell (1-R01-HD37507) and a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center grant to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania (NSF-STC Cooperative Agreement number SBR-89-20230). The ToBI analyses were expertly executed by Alejna Brugos. These analyses and the preparation of this manuscript were supported by an NSF grant to the first author (NSF-BCS 0623945).

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.06.012 Byline: Malathi Thothathiri, Jesse Snedeker Keywords: Syntactic priming; Structural priming; Syntax; Comprehension; Children Abstract: We report two sets of experiments that demonstrate syntactic priming from comprehension to comprehension in young children. Children acted out double-object and prepositional-object dative sentences while we monitored their eye movements. We measured whether hearing one type of dative as a prime influenced children's online interpretation of subsequent dative utterances. In target sentences, the onset of the direct object noun was consistent with both an animate recipient and an inanimate theme, creating a temporary ambiguity in the argument structure of the verb (double-object e.g., Show the hor se the book; prepositional-object e.g., Show the hor n to the dog). The first set of experiments demonstrated priming in four-year-old children (M=4.1), both when the same verb was used in prime and target sentences (Experiment 1a) and when different verbs were used (Experiment 1b). The second set found parallel priming in three-year-old children (M=3.1). These results indicate that young children employ abstract structural representations during online sentence comprehension. Author Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Article History: Received 15 September 2006; Revised 21 June 2007

The use of contextual and lexical cues on both the ontogenetic and the chronometric time scales is explored. The results indicate that adults combine lexical and referential information to determine syntactic choice.

It is suggested that a speaker's knowledge of the referential situation affects his/her usage of prosody to provide alternate meaning in an ambiguous utterance. The experiments undertaken indicate that informative prosodic cues are dependent on the speaker's awareness of the situation and that both the speakers and the listeners use prosodic cues as and when needed.

Highlights: [•] Passive sentences in English feature a temporary ambiguity in role assignments. [•] Morphosyntactic markers in Mandarin unambiguously identify roles. [•] Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds used markers to incrementally assign roles in sentences. [•] Children’s actions were often incorrect when markers followed referential NPs. [•] Difficulties with passives reflect limitations in revising initial interpretations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]