Developmental changes in how children generalize from their experience to support predictive linguistic processing

Prediction is posited to support fluent comprehension of speech-but how and when do young listeners, who encounter unfamiliar and novel events with high frequency, learn to deploy predictive processing strategies in these unfamiliar circumstances? The current work used a discourse-based event teaching paradigm to explore how English-speaking school-aged children (aged 5;0-8;11 [years;months]; N = 92) generalize from their (experimentally controlled) experience to generate real-time linguistic predictions about novel events during an eye-tracked sentence recognition task. The findings reveal developmental differences in how the initial structure of event exposure supports generalization. Specifically, real-time extension was supported by viewing multiple instances of events involving varied agents in the younger children (5-6 years), whereas older children (7-8 years) extended when they experienced repetition of events with identical agents. The findings support accounts of predictive processing suggesting that learners generate predictions in a variety of less predictable circumstances and suggest practical directions to support early learning and language processing skills.