Decades of research has demonstrated that adult listeners rapidly integrate many kinds of information to determine the syntactic and semantic relations between words in an utterance. The study of children's language processing, however, is still in its infancy. This is largely because most of the methods used to study adult comprehension involve reading or secondary tasks too difficult for young children. In recent years this has changed: Several researchers have demonstrated that children's eye-movements can provide detailed information about the moment-to-moment processes involved in spoken-language comprehension. The present project will build on these initial findings, using the eye-gaze paradigm to investigate syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processes in children from 3 to 7 years of age. The PI will examine three specific questions: First, what information do children use to determine the syntactic structure of an utterance? Children's interpretation of ambiguous sentences will be used to explore the roles of prosody, word knowledge, and semantic plausibility. Second, what kinds of grammatical representations are used during language comprehension? A priming paradigm will be used to explore the nature and scope of these structural categories. Third, does children's language comprehension provide any evidence for the theoretical distinction between the meaning of an utterance (semantics) and the inferences that we make upon hearing it (pragmatics)? Children's eye-movements will be analyzed to determine whether they spontaneously make pragmatic inferences when listening to unambiguous utterances. Although the development of the language comprehension system is of importance in its own right, this work will also provide insight into: children's syntactic representations, the architecture of adult language processing, and the relation between word learning and syntactic development.
This research will map out the development of higher-level language comprehension processes. Strong language comprehension skills are essential to cognitive and social development. Spoken language is the primary means by which young children are socialized and educated. Their knowledge of distant places, family relations, and abstract entities develops largely by listening to adults. Literacy also builds upon children's ability to understand spoken language, as evidenced by robust connections between preschool language comprehension and later reading abilities. By tracing the development of these language comprehension processes from three years of age, this research may provide insight into why some children seem to have great difficulties in comprehension and what can be done to facilitate the development of these skills. As this project proceeds, it will provide unique educational opportunities for several graduate and undergraduate students.
