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Toddlers exploit referential and syntactic cues to flexibly adapt their interpretation of novel verb meanings
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In: ISSN: 0022-0965 ; EISSN: 1096-0457 ; Journal of Experimental Child Psychology ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03468213 ; Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Elsevier, 2021, 203, pp.105017. ⟨10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105017⟩ (2021)
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Abstract:
International audience ; Because linguistic communication is often noisy and uncertain, adults flexibly rely on different information sources during sentence processing. We tested whether toddlers engage in a similar process and how that process interacts with verb learning. Across two experiments, we presented French 28-month-olds with right-dislocated sentences featuring a novel verb (“Hei is VERBing, the boyi”), where a clear prosodic boundary after the verb indicates that the sentence is intransitive (such that the NP “the boy” is coreferential with the pronoun “he” and the sentence means “The boy is VERBing”). By default, toddlers incorrectly interpreted the sentence based on the number of NPs (assuming, e.g., that someone is VERBing the boy). Yet, when children were provided with additional information about the syntactic contexts (Experiment 1, N = 81) or the referential/semantic content (Experiment 2, N = 72) of the novel verb, they successfully used the prosodic information as a cue to reach the correct syntactic structure of the sentence and infer the probable meaning of the novel verb. These results suggest that toddlers can flexibly adjust their interpretations of sentences depending on the reliability of the linguistic cues available. Thus, failure to parse a sentence in an adult-like fashion might not necessarily reflect the immaturity of children’s parsing system but rather might be indicative of what cues children consider reliable in that context.
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Keyword:
[SCCO.LING]Cognitive science/Linguistics; [SCCO.PSYC]Cognitive science/Psychology; [SCCO]Cognitive science; Cognitive development; Language acquisition; Language processing; Noisy channel; Open data; Open materials; Syntactic bootstrapping
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URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105017 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03468213/file/de_Carvalho_et_al_inpress_daserflex_HAL_version.pdf https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03468213 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03468213/document
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“ Look! It is not a bamoule! ”: 18‐ and 24‐month‐olds can use negative sentences to constrain their interpretation of novel word meanings
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In: ISSN: 1363-755X ; EISSN: 1467-7687 ; Developmental Science ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03141397 ; Developmental Science, Wiley, 2021, ⟨10.1111/desc.13085⟩ (2021)
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Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children
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In: EISSN: 1664-1078 ; Frontiers in Psychology ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02951180 ; Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers, 2019, 10, ⟨10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00274⟩ (2019)
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Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations : an ERP study
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Scalar Implicatures: The Psychological Reality of Scales
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In: EISSN: 1664-1078 ; Frontiers in Psychology ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02951229 ; Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers, 2016, 7, ⟨10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01500⟩ (2016)
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English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing
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In: ISSN: 0001-4966 ; EISSN: 1520-8524 ; Journal of the Acoustical Society of America ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02951351 ; Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Acoustical Society of America, 2016, ⟨10.1121/1.4954385]⟩ (2016)
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English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing
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