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  • If toddlers distinguish between grammatical

    2018-11-03

    If toddlers distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences on the basis of the relative frequency of word strings (pairs, triplets, or more generally n-grams), this would imply that they rely on memorized chunks of sentences and may not be able of a more abstract processing based on syntactic categories – which would be particularly useful in language acquisition, as it liothyronine sodium would allow learners to generalize to novel situations. However, a frequency of zero does not necessarily imply that a sentence is ungrammatical. It is precisely because syntax is more than a mere frequency analysis that humans can interpret sentences they have never heard before. As a consequence, the only way to eliminate frequency confounds and truly test whether toddlers are able to perform syntactic computations, is to use novel words, for which the listener has not yet established any frequency counts. In the present experiment, we thus test listeners’ sensitivity to the grammatical usage of newly-learned nouns and verbs. As these novel words are only heard in a laboratory setting, this allows us to control the contexts in which they occur during training and use novel contexts at test. This way, only if processing is grammatical in nature will listeners be able to discriminate the grammatical and ungrammatical structures. To establish a baseline against which children\'s performance could be compared, we first test a group of adults in this paradigm in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, we subsequently extend this work to 24-month-old toddlers.
    Experiment 1: adults In Experiment 1, we validate our experimental stimuli by examining adults’ sensitivity to the grammatical structure of sentences containing novel words. This ensures that participants in this experiment rely on the grammatical structure of the sentence, rather than on local sequences of words that tend to co-occur. Although past work has convincingly shown that adults compute the grammatical structure of sentences online, and that they can learn novel words efficiently and with tremendous speed (Batterink and Neville, 2011; Davis and Gaskell, 2009), it is important to verify that newly acquired words undergo syntactic processing similar to well-known words, and hence trigger similar ERP responses. Adults were first taught the meaning of four new words (e.g., touse meaning triceratops). In the following test phase, they listened to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing these novel words (e.g., , ‘The Indian pushes the touseN’; *de joie, ‘*Then she tousesit happily’, respectively), and, solely for comparison purposes, to grammatical and ungrammatical liothyronine sodium sentences containing familiar words (e.g., à Marie, ‘And larynx dogsit to Marie’; , ‘Then she scolds the dog’). Crucially, at test, these words were presented following an ambiguous function word (le, ‘the/it’), which had never been used before these critical words during the teaching period. Therefore, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences contained local co-occurrences of words that had a frequency of zero, and only the computation of the syntactic category of each word in the sentence would allow listeners to detect whether or not a word fits within the syntactic structure. We expect to observe a P600, a robust component often observed following a syntactic error. We might also observe an early component, ELAN or N400, depending on the weight given to the lexical or syntactic information carried by the target word in this particular paradigm (Friederici, 2011; Luck, 2005).
    Experiment 2
    General discussion In a series of two studies, we examined adults’ and children\'s ability to execute syntactic computations online. Using ERPs, we found that adults and children alike rapidly compute expectations regarding the possible syntactic categories of upcoming words and match these to the actual syntactic category of the words they hear. Moreover, this pattern of results was found regardless of whether listeners had long known the critical words or acquired them only recently. As these newly-learned words had never been heard in any of the test contexts, and both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences contained novel strings of words (le+critical word), toddlers’ responses cannot have been due to hearing unfamiliar strings of words. This suggests that 24-month-olds, as well as adults, rely on abstract syntactic categories during on-line analysis of their language input.