Publication:
German-speaking children use sentence-initial case marking for predictive language processing at age four

dc.contributor.coauthorÖzge, Duygu
dc.contributor.coauthorKornfilt, Jaklin
dc.contributor.coauthorMaquate, Katja
dc.contributor.coauthorSnedeker, Jesse
dc.contributor.departmentDepartment of Psychology
dc.contributor.kuauthorKüntay, Aylin C.
dc.contributor.schoolcollegeinstituteCollege of Social Sciences and Humanities
dc.date.accessioned2024-11-09T23:44:52Z
dc.date.issued2022
dc.description.abstractAdults incrementally integrate multiple sources of information to predict the upcoming linguistic structure. Although we have substantial evidence that children can use lexicosemantic information triggered by the verb, we have limited information as to whether children can use morphosyntax to generate predictions during the course of processing. Previous studies show that four-year-old Turkish-speaking children can use case-marking cues predictively; however German-speaking children have been reported to fail until late in development. The present visual-world eye-tracking study provides the first evidence from four-year-old German-speaking children (mean age: 4;03) interpreting sentence initial case marking cues independent of the identity of the verb and the canonical word order to predict the thematic role of the upcoming argument. We presented children with a visual context with a stereotypical but ambiguous event, the thematic structure of which can be resolved only on the basis of the case marking cues on subject-initial and object-initial structures locating the verb sentence-finally. Children were able to use the accusative case on the non-canonical object-initial utterances to predict that the upcoming argument should have the agent role before this argument and the verb became available. This study shows that the previously reported discrepancy between these two case-marking languages (i.e., Turkish and German) is not due to the crosslinguistic differences but due to methodological differences employed across studies. These findings provide support for language acquisition theories assuming early abstractions and adult-like parsing mechanisms predictively integrating multiple sources of cues.
dc.description.indexedbyWOS
dc.description.indexedbyScopus
dc.description.indexedbyPubMed
dc.description.openaccessNO
dc.description.publisherscopeInternational
dc.description.sponsoredbyTubitakEuN/A
dc.description.sponsorshipEuropean Commission Research Executive Agency Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship [FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IOF 301637] This research was supported by a grant from European Commission Research Executive Agency Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship (FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IOF 301637) to D.Ozge. We thank Pia Knoeferle for hosting the study at University of Bielefeld and for her collaboration in this study, Ebru Evcen for data trimming and the Growth Curve Analysis, and Ilgar Veryeri for the visual material.
dc.description.volume221
dc.identifier.doi10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104988
dc.identifier.eissn1873-7838
dc.identifier.issn0010-0277
dc.identifier.quartileQ1
dc.identifier.scopus2-s2.0-85121582009
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104988
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/13741
dc.identifier.wos745682900004
dc.keywordsChild language processing
dc.keywordsDevelopment of parsing abilities
dc.keywordsAcquisition of german case marking
dc.keywordsPredictive use of case marking
dc.keywordsIncremental processing in children word-order
dc.keywordsComprehension
dc.keywordsVerbs
dc.keywordsKnowledge
dc.keywordsInformation
dc.keywordsActivation
dc.keywordsSchemas
dc.keywordsModels
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherElsevier
dc.relation.ispartofCognition
dc.subjectPsychology
dc.subjectExperimental psychology
dc.titleGerman-speaking children use sentence-initial case marking for predictive language processing at age four
dc.typeJournal Article
dspace.entity.typePublication
local.contributor.kuauthorKüntay, Aylin C.
local.publication.orgunit1College of Social Sciences and Humanities
local.publication.orgunit2Department of Psychology
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublicationd5fc0361-3a0a-4b96-bf2e-5cd6b2b0b08c
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication.latestForDiscoveryd5fc0361-3a0a-4b96-bf2e-5cd6b2b0b08c
relation.isParentOrgUnitOfPublication3f7621e3-0d26-42c2-af64-58a329522794
relation.isParentOrgUnitOfPublication.latestForDiscovery3f7621e3-0d26-42c2-af64-58a329522794

Files