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Sensitivity to discontinuous dependencies in language learners: evidence for limitations in processing space
1Department of Applied Linguistics, Portland State University, OR 97225, USA.
Cognition
|January 23, 1999
Summary
Eighteen-month-old infants can detect grammatical dependencies between English words like "is" and "-ing." However, 15-month-olds and older infants with longer word gaps show limited sensitivity to these morphosyntactic structures.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Early language acquisition involves understanding grammatical rules.
- Children's ability to process complex sentence structures develops over time.
- Morphosyntactic dependencies are crucial for comprehending language.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate 15- and 18-month-old infants' sensitivity to morphosyntactic dependencies in English.
- To examine how processing distance affects infants' detection of grammatical structures.
- To explore the developmental trajectory of understanding functor morphemes.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the Headturn Preference Procedure across five experiments.
- Exposed infants to passages with grammatical (is + -ing) and ungrammatical (can + -ing) dependencies.
- Systematically varied the distance between dependent morphemes using adverbials.
Main Results:
- Eighteen-month-olds preferred grammatically correct passages over ungrammatical ones.
- Fifteen-month-olds did not show a significant preference.
- The preference in 18-month-olds was limited to dependencies within 1-3 syllables, suggesting a processing window.
Conclusions:
- Eighteen-month-olds demonstrate an emerging ability to track relationships between functor morphemes.
- Infants' language processing may be constrained by a limited attentional window.
- These findings shed light on the early development of grammatical processing in infants.