Children and adults successfully comprehend subject-only sentences online

Abstract

In many offline studies, children show selectively better comprehension of sentences with the focus particle only when it modifies the object argument (Jane only ate an apple) than they do when it modifies the subject argument (Only Jane ate an apple). Here we explore the nature of this asymmetry by examining performance in a different kind of task: the moment-to-moment comprehension of unambiguous sentences. If past errors reflect a fundamental difference in representation or complexity of computation, we would expect the same asymmetry in this task. We observed that adults were able to successfully predict the target referent for both types of only-sentences, as indicated by anticipatory looks, while 6- to 8-year-old children could do so only for subject-modifying only-sentences. These findings suggest that much of the asymmetry in past work may be due to task demands. We discuss the implications of these results for children’s syntactic and pragmatic development.

Cognitive Flexibility Moderates the Predictive Effect of Phonological Awareness on Focus Structures in Chinese Preschool Children

“…The 5-year-old children showed more difficulty in understanding pre-subject focus sentences, while the 6-year-old children had basically mastered the pre-subject focus sentences [16]. This result confirmed that the age between 5 and 6 years old is important for cognitive development regarding focus structures [11,15]. Nevertheless, the aforementioned research solely examined the eye movement processing characteristics of Chinese children's comprehension of focus structures, without delving into specific cognitive factors.…”

“…Inhibitory control is a subcomponent of executive function. Another perspective is that although children can understand both types of focus structures as quickly as adults, their cognitive flexibility leads to them having difficulty switching between the two types of sentences in the same experimental sequence, leading to interference effects [11]. Cognitive flexibility is another subcomponent of executive function.…”

“…However, most studies do not account for the influence of phonological awareness on focus structures. Moreover, previous studies examining the comprehension of focus structures among children aged 4-6 have predominantly utilized sentence-picture judgment tasks [15], truth value judgment tasks [7], and visual world paradigms [10,11]. These studies share a commonality in that the experimental sentence materials are presented auditorily, potentially confounding the influence of individual differences in phonological awareness among children.…”

“…Acquiring the ability to process focus structures suggests that children have mastered syntactic recursion and component attachment at a young age and can engage in pragmatic reasoning by integrating contextual information. Numerous studies have utilized focus particles as research material to explore the cognitive characteristics associated with children's comprehension of focus structures [9][10][11][12]. Therefore, this study focuses on exploring how the cognitive ability of preschool children affects their comprehension of focus structures after hearing them.…”

Assessing two methods of webcam-based eye-tracking for child language research

“…Experiment 1: visual-world task Experiment 1 comprised two linked experiments focused on the phonemic cohort competition effect. This effect is well-suited for testing the efficacy of web-based visualworld eye-tracking, as it has been replicated many times with both adults (e.g., Allopenna et al, 1998;Dahan & Gaskell, 2007;Dahan et al, 2001;Farris-Trimble & McMurray, 2013;Magnuson et al, 1999;inter alia) and children (e.g., Desroches et al, 2006;Sekerina & Brooks, 2007;Rigler et al, 2015;Weighall et al, 2017;inter alia), and the presence of cohort activation is often used to investigate higher-level linguistic constraints on incremental language processing (e.g., Dahan & Tanenhaus, 2004;Gaston et al, 2020;Ito et al, 2018;Li et al, 2022;Paul et al, 2019). In a visual-world context, cohort competition effects arise when listeners hear a target word that shares onset phonemes with one of the images on the screen; when hearing the onset of the target word (e.g., beaker), listeners fixate more on the image of a cohort competitor (e.g., beetle) than phonologically-unrelated distractors (e.g., carriage) (e.g., Allopenna et al, 1998).…”