Two-year-olds compute syntactic structure on-line

Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences. We observed an early left-lateralized brain response when an expected verb was incorrectly replaced by a noun (or vice versa). Thus, toddlers build on-line expectations as to the syntactic category of the next word in a sentence. In addition, the response topography was different for nouns and verbs, suggesting that different neural networks already underlie noun and verb processing in toddlers, as they do in adults.