Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP...

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Listeners categorize words by class to understand language.
• Function words offer clues to word class, with sensitivity developing early.
• Children may use more than just adjacent words for word categorization.

Purpose of the Study:

• Examine if young children use preceding sentence context for online syntactic categorization.
• Investigate 18-month-olds' processing of the ambiguous French word 'la'.
• Determine if toddlers integrate non-adjacent context during word categorization.

Main Methods:

• Recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from French-learning 18-month-olds.
• Presented sentences with the ambiguous word 'la' followed by nouns or verbs.
• Manipulated preceding sentence context to create grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.

Main Results:

• Ungrammatical sentences elicited a late positivity (P600-like ERP) not seen in grammatical ones.
• Toddlers' brain responses indicated analysis beyond local word co-occurrences.
• Evidence suggests 18-month-olds integrate non-adjacent sentence context.

Conclusions:

• Online word categorization in toddlers is robust by 18 months.
• Children utilize broader sentence context for syntactic categorization.
• This early contextual processing likely supports vocabulary acquisition.