When Gender Arrives: Predictive Language Processing in the Third Year

Predictive language comprehension allows children to use prior context to anticipate upcoming information before it becomes available in speech. Although young children use sentence meaning to guide real-time comprehension, less is known about when they generate more specific expectations about upcoming words without direct cues. Across two visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we used a grammatical contrast in Spanish as a test case to examine whether children aged 24, 30, and 36 months could use sentence context to guide attention before the expected word was heard. Highly predictable sentence contexts were followed by a silent interval before the final noun, allowing us to distinguish anticipatory looking from later word recognition. In Experiment 1, visual displays included a gender-matched object that shared grammatical gender with the expected noun and also carried transparent surface-form cues. In Experiment 2, those cues were removed, providing a stricter test of whether children could use internally generated expectations before word onset. Results showed anticipatory looks to the expected target across age groups, indicating context-based prediction. However, looks to the gender-matched object followed a more selective developmental pattern. With surface cues, the Gender-matched > Unrelated contrast was reliable at 30 and 36 months and larger at 36 than at 24 months. Without surface cues, it was reliable only at 36 months. These findings suggest that children's predictions develop from broad expectations about upcoming words toward more specific, linguistically structured expectations between 24 and 36 months. More generally, early predictive processing becomes increasingly precise as language representations become more stable and accessible.