Predictive Sentence Parsing in Monolingual and Bilingual Learners

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Speech processing models support real-time, incremental language comprehension.
• Young children demonstrate predictive processing abilities, including "listening ahead."
• Previous research on predictive processing has largely focused on monolingual children.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how bilingual and monolingual children use verb information to predict upcoming nouns.
• To examine children's sensitivity to mispronunciations in predictive contexts.
• To explore the impact of language experience on the temporal dynamics of incremental sentence processing.

Main Methods:

• Tested Singaporean Mandarin-English bilingual and English monolingual children.
• Utilized eye-tracking to measure target fixation on nouns.
• Presented nouns preceded by constraining verbs, including correct and mispronounced versions.

Main Results:

• Children increased target fixation when nouns were preceded by constraining verbs.
• Target fixation was higher for correct pronunciations than mispronunciations.
• Bilingual children showed earlier resolution of conflicting cues (correct vs. mispronounced nouns) compared to monolinguals.

Conclusions:

• Language experience, particularly bilingualism, influences the temporal dynamics of incremental speech processing.
• Children are sensitive to both semantic context (verbs) and phonetic accuracy (pronunciation).
• Bilingual learners may develop more efficient mechanisms for resolving linguistic prediction errors.