Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP study

Brusini, Perrine ORCID: 0000-0003-0703-7765, Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine, van Heugten, Marieke, de Carvalho, Alex, Goffinet, Francois, Fievet, Anne-Caroline and Christophe, Anne (2017) Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP study. NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA, 98. pp. 4-12.

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Abstract

To comprehend language, listeners need to encode the relationship between words within sentences. This entails categorizing words into their appropriate word classes. Function words, consistently preceding words from specific categories (e.g., the ballNOUN, I speakVERB), provide invaluable information for this task, and children's sensitivity to such adjacent relationships develops early on in life. However, neighboring words are not the sole source of information regarding an item's word class. Here we examine whether young children also take into account preceding sentence context online during syntactic categorization. To address this question, we use the ambiguous French function word la which, depending on sentence context, can either be used as determiner (the, preceding nouns) or as object clitic (it, preceding verbs). French-learning 18-month-olds’ evoked potentials (ERPs) were recorded while they listened to sentences featuring this ambiguous function word followed by either a noun or a verb (thus yielding a locally felicitous co-occurrence of la + noun or la + verb). Crucially, preceding sentence context rendered the sentence either grammatical or ungrammatical. Ungrammatical sentences elicited a late positivity (resembling a P600) that was not observed for grammatical sentences. Toddlers’ analysis of the unfolding sentence was thus not limited to local co-occurrences, but rather took into account non-adjacent sentence context. These findings suggest that by 18 months of age, online word categorization is already surprisingly robust. This could be greatly beneficial for the acquisition of novel words.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Noun-verb categorization, Function words, Event related potentials, Early syntactic processing, Brain
Divisions:	Faculty of Health and Life Sciences Faculty of Health and Life Sciences > Institute of Population Health
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	10 Jan 2024 09:38
Last Modified:	10 Jan 2024 09:38
DOI:	10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.08.015
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3177715