Exploring socioeconomic differences in syntactic development through the lens of real-time processing

Area of Science:

• Child language acquisition
• Developmental psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Caregiver input differences across socioeconomic status (SES) influence syntactic development.
• The precise mechanisms linking input, SES, and syntactic development remain unclear.
• Potential mechanisms include differences in acquiring syntactic knowledge versus accessing it during real-time communication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the mechanisms underlying SES-related differences in syntactic development.
• To distinguish between the acquisition of syntactic representations and their real-time access during sentence interpretation.
• To examine how SES affects the processing of active versus passive sentence constructions in children.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an eye-tracking and act-out paradigm with 129 children aged 3–7 years from diverse SES backgrounds.
• Compared children's real-time interpretation of active and passive sentences.
• Analyzed eye-fixation patterns during sentence presentation and subsequent act-out responses.

Main Results:

• Children from higher SES backgrounds demonstrated robust disambiguation of sentence constructions.
• Children from lower SES backgrounds showed less sensitivity in real-time sentence processing.
• SES-related differences in processing were evident for passive sentences requiring syntactic revision, but not for those not requiring revision.

Conclusions:

• All children appear capable of acquiring passive sentence structures.
• Socioeconomic status-related differences in real-time language processing can impede accurate utterance interpretation.
• Understanding these processing differences is crucial for addressing disparities in language development.