Sensitivity to Morphosyntactic Information in 3-Year-Old Children With Typical Language Development: A Feasibility Study

Abstract

Purpose This study tested the feasibility of a method designed to assess children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., Are the nice little dogs running? ). We expected that a group of children who were proficient in auxiliary use would show this sensitivity, indicating an awareness of the relation between the subject–verb sequence (e.g., dogs running ) and preceding information (e.g., are ). Failure to grasp this relation is proposed to play a role in the protracted inconsistency in auxiliary use in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method Fifteen 3-year-old typically developing children who demonstrated proficiency in auxiliary use viewed pairs of pictures showing a single agent and multiple agents while hearing questions with or without an agreeing fronted auxiliary. Proportion looking to the target was measured. Results Children showed anticipatory looking on the basis of the number information contained in the auxiliary ( is or are ). Conclusions The children tested in this study represent a group that frequently serves as a comparison for older children with SLI. Because the method successfully demonstrated their sensitivity to tense/agreement information in questions, future research that involves direct comparisons of these 2 groups is warranted.

Comprehension of the copula: preschoolers (and sometimes adults) ignore subject–verb agreement during sentence processing

“…The results expand on previous findings, demonstrating that children (and to some degree, adults) use lexical form as the primary cue to meaningeven in the presence of copula SV agreement. Despite predictions that three-and four-year-olds would use copula SV agreement to comprehend the number of morphologically ambiguous /ks/-final nouns (Deevy et al, 2017;Lukyanenko & Fisher, 2016), we found that children primarily relied on the perceived number information at the end of the word. That is, children interpreted morphologically ambiguous nouns in sentences as such as where is the gex (/geks/)?…”

“…Other visual world tasks have demonstrated that children aged from 30 months to six years are able to use plural copula SV agreement (i.e., are) to facilitate comprehension of familiar plural words, but do not seem to do the same with singular copula SV agreement (i.e., is; Lukyanenko & Fisher, 2016;Lukyanenko & Miller, 2018). Another study found that three-year-olds can use both is and are to correctly predict familiar pictures before being explicitly named, yet they had greater accuracy in predicting plural targets (Deevy, Leonard, & Marchman, 2017). Cross-linguistic differences have also been found.…”

“…One of the differences between studies finding children able to comprehend English SV number agreement and those who did not was the type of SV agreement tested. Those studies finding children unable to comprehend SV agreement examined the third person singular verbal inflection (3SG: e.g., the boy jumps; de Villiers & Johnson, 2007;Johnson et al, 2005;Legendre et al, 2014), whereas those where children did exhibit comprehension examined the copula (is/are; Deevy et al, 2017;Kouider et al, 2006;Lukyanenko & Fisher, 2016;Wood et al, 2009). While children are sensitive to 3SG from an early age (Soderstrom et al, 2007;Sundara et al, 2011), this may simply be sensitivity to phonological patterns in their input (Naigles, 2002).…”

“…Given that three-year-olds can use is/are number information to identify target pictures before they are explicitly named (Deevy et al, 2017), we predicted that children would use the copula to help resolve number ambiguity in novel words ending in /ks/ clusters (e.g., gex), which can either be singular or plural. That is, we predicted that three-and four-year-olds would use SV number agreement (in the absence of other clues) to determine the number condition of a previously unheard word.…”

Reciprocal relations between syntax and tense/agreement morphology in children’s interpretation of input: A look at children with specific language impairment

“…As a first step in exploring this idea, Deevy et al (2014Deevy et al ( , 2017 used a looking-whilelistening procedure. For each item, two pictures were presented on a large screen, such as a drawing of one boy running and another of two dogs running.…”