Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences?: A permutation analysis.

Abstract

We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active from passive sentences, after processing the remainder of the sentence frame. For this second question we used eye-tracking (Study 1) and forced-choice pointing (Study 2). For both studies, we used a paradigm in which participants simultaneously saw two novel actions with reversed agent-patient relations while listening to active and passive sentences. We compared English-speaking 25-month-olds and 41-month-olds in between-subjects sentence structure conditions (Active Transitive Condition vs. Passive Condition). A permutation analysis found that both age groups showed a bias to incrementally map the first noun in a sentence onto an agent role. Regarding the second question, 25-month-olds showed some evidence of distinguishing the two structures in the eye-tracking study. However, the 25-month-olds did not distinguish active from passive sentences in the forced choice pointing task. In contrast, the 41-month-old children did reanalyse their initial first-NP-as-agent bias to the extent that they clearly distinguished between active and passive sentences both in the eye-tracking data and in the pointing task. The results are discussed in relation to the development of syntactic (re)parsing.

More lexically-specific knowledge and individual differences in adult native speakers' processing of the English passive

“…Thus children appear to adhere to the canonical semantic role assignment of the active transitive declarative construction (i.e., AGENT VERB PATIENT). There is also evidence from adult native speakers of English, particularly those with lower academic attainment, exhibiting similar problems processing and interpreting full passive constructions (see, e.g., Abbot-Smith et al, 2017, Ferreira 2003, Dąbrowska & Street 2006, Street & Dąbrowska 2010.…”

Looking represents choosing in toddlers: Exploring the equivalence between multimodal measures in forced‐choice tasks

“…Therefore, it may be recommended and beneficial that both results from pointing and looking measures, and the proportion of absent pointing responses should be reported to interpret obtained data in more detail. In fact, some researchers conducted a similar task using both modalities as dependent variables and compared differences between them (Abbot‐Smith et al, 2017; Gurteen et al, 2011; Hendrickson & Friend, 2013; Hendrickson et al, 2015, 2017). Future research is needed to investigate a more nuanced relationship between looking and manual measurements.…”

“…Few studies have investigated children's looking and concurrent manual responses within the same 2AFC task because most infant and toddler studies used either of these measures selectively (Hendrickson et al, 2015). Moreover, some researchers remain skeptical about looking time as an appropriate index reflecting higher‐order cognitive abilities (Haith, 1998) and it has often been reported that there were dissociations of results between modalities in research not only on language but also on other cognitive development (Abbot‐Smith et al, 2017; Ahmed & Ruffman, 1998; Charles & Rivera, 2009; Gurteen et al, 2011; Ruffman et al, 2001; Winters et al, 2015). Hence, it is unknown to what extent looking and manual measurements can be interpreted analogously.…”

Mistakes weren’t made: Three-year-olds’ comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax

“…As noted in the Introduction, children struggle with them for years, and even adults make errors with passives (e.g., Ferreira, 2003). Likely contributors to this persistent difficulty with passives include their low input frequency (e.g., Allen & Crago, 1996;Demuth, 1989), the difficulty of revising an initial commitment to a canonical agent-first interpretation in online comprehension (Abbot-Smith, Chang, Rowland, Ferguson, & Pine, 2017;Huang et al, 2017;Huang, Zheng, Meng, & Snedeker, 2013;Pozzan and Trueswell, 2015), and the assessment of passives without appropriate discourse context. The typical function of the passive is to talk about the role of a discourse-prominent patient; both children and adults produce and understand passives more readily when the patient's role is in focus (e.g., Brooks & Tomasello, 1999;Crain et al, 2009;Lempert, 1990).…”