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Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
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Processing grammatical gender in Dutch: Evidence from eye movements.
Susanne Brouwer1, Simone Sprenger2, Sharon Unsworth1
1Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|March 8, 2017
Summary
Children can understand Dutch grammatical gender online before they can produce it. Successful production of gender marking in articles may trigger complete online comprehension in young Dutch speakers.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Grammatical gender acquisition in Dutch is typically a late-developing linguistic skill.
- Previous research relied solely on production data, potentially underestimating children's comprehension abilities.
- The relationship between online processing and production of grammatical gender in children remains underexplored.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if Dutch-speaking children and adults use article-based gender marking for anticipatory or facilitative processing during online sentence comprehension.
- To examine the relationship between children's online processing of gender marking and their production abilities.
- To determine if successful online comprehension can precede target-like production of grammatical gender.
Main Methods:
- An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with 49 Dutch-speaking children (ages 4-7) and 19 adult controls.
- Participants processed sentences with visual displays containing two objects, with nouns of same or different genders.
- Children were categorized into target-like and non-target-like production groups based on neuter noun gender marking.
Main Results:
- Adults and children with target-like gender production used gender marking anticipatorily (predicting upcoming nouns).
- Children with non-target-like production used gender marking only facilitatively (aiding processing once the noun appeared).
- Online comprehension abilities were observed even in children not yet producing gender marking target-like.
Conclusions:
- Successful online comprehension of grammatical gender may be partially achieved before target-like production is fully established.
- Target-like production of gender marking appears to be a crucial factor for fully successful online comprehension.
- This study highlights the distinction between comprehension and production in language acquisition, particularly for complex grammatical features like gender.
