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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 16, 2026

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL): Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL): Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Published on: December 14, 2012

Two-year-olds compute syntactic structure on-line.

Savita Bernal¹, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Séverine Millotte

¹Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS/CNRS/DEC-ENS, Paris, France.

Developmental Science

|February 4, 2010

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Toddlers possess syntactic abilities earlier than previously thought. Event-related potentials reveal 2-year-olds process sentence structure and anticipate word categories, indicating early language development.

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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Psycholinguistics
Neuroscience

Background:

Human syntax enables infinite sentences from finite words.
Toddlers' limited utterances suggested a lack of early syntactic ability.
Previous research presumed syntax develops later in childhood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if toddlers compute syntactic structure while listening.
To determine if young children form on-line grammatical expectations.
To explore neural underpinnings of word processing in toddlers.

Main Methods:

Utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure brain activity.
Presented 2-year-olds with spoken sentences containing grammatical errors.
Analyzed brain responses to expected vs. unexpected word substitutions.

Main Results:

Observed early left-lateralized brain responses to syntactic errors (noun/verb swaps).
Demonstrated toddlers' ability to form on-line expectations of word categories.
Found distinct topographical brain responses for nouns and verbs.

Conclusions:

Toddlers compute syntactic structure in real-time during language comprehension.
Early language development includes forming grammatical predictions.
Differentiated neural networks for noun and verb processing exist in toddlers.