Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T08:14:00.627Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Whatdunit?” Developmental changes in children's syntactically based sentence interpretation abilities and sensitivity to word order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2015

JAMES W. MONTGOMERY ,
JULIA L. EVANS ,
RONALD B. GILLAM ,
ALEXANDER V. SERGEEV  and
MIANISHA C. FINNEY
JAMES W. MONTGOMERY*
Affiliation:
Ohio University
JULIA L. EVANS
Affiliation:
University of Texas–Dallas
RONALD B. GILLAM
Affiliation:
Utah State University
ALEXANDER V. SERGEEV
Affiliation:
Ohio University
MIANISHA C. FINNEY
Affiliation:
Ohio University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE James Montgomery, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701. E-mail: montgoj1@ohio.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Aim 1 of this study was to examine the developmental changes in typically developing English-speaking children's syntactically based sentence interpretation abilities and sensitivity to word order. Aim 2 was to determine the psychometric standing of the novel sentence interpretation task developed for this study, because we wish to use it later with children with specific language impairment. Children listened to semantically implausible sentences in which noun animacy and the natural affordance between the nouns were removed, thus controlling for event probability. Using this novel “whatdunit?” agent selection task, 256 children 7–11 years old listened to two structures with canonical word order and two with noncanonical word order. After each sentence, children selected as quickly as possible the picture of the noun they believed was “doing the action.” Children interpreted sentences with canonical word order with greater accuracy and speed than those with noncanonical word order. Older children (mean age = 10 years, 8 months) were more accurate and faster than younger children (mean age = 8 years, 1 month) across all sentence forms. Both older and younger children demonstrated similar error patterns across sentence type. The “whatdunit?” task also proved to have strong validity and reliability, making it suitable for studies with children with specific language impairment.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 6 , November 2016 , pp. 1281 - 1309
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Altmann, G., & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73, 247–264.Google Scholar
American National Standards Institute. (1997). Specifications of audiometers (ANSI/ANS-8.3–1997; R2003). New York: Author.Google Scholar
Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1987). Competition variation and language learning. In MacWhinney, B. (Ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model. In MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (Eds.), The cross-linguistic study of sentence processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E., MacWhinney, B., Caselli, C., Devescovi, A., Natale, F., & Venza, V. (1984). A crosslinguistic study of the development of sentence interpretation strategies. Child Development, 55, 341–354.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bishop, D. (2006). What causes specific language impairment in children? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 217–221.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Booth, J., MacWhinney, B., & Harasaki, Y. (2000). Developmental differences in visual and auditory processing of complex sentences. Child Development, 71, 981–1003.Google Scholar
Borovsky, A., Elman, J., & Fernald, A. (2012). Knowing a lot for one's age: Vocabulary skill and not age is associated with anticipatory incremental sentence interpretation in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 112, 417–436.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carrow-Woolfolk, E. (1999). Comprehensive assessment of spoken language. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.Google Scholar
Chapman, R., & Kohn, L. (1978). Comprehension strategies in two- and three-year olds: Animate agents or probable events? Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 21, 746–761.Google Scholar
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Coltheart, M. (1981). The MRC psycholinguistic database. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 33A, 497–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corrigan, R., & Odya-Weis, C. (1985). The comprehension of semantic relations by two-year-olds: An exploratory study. Journal of Child Language, 12, 47–59.Google Scholar
Dick, F., Wulfeck, B., Krupa-Kwiatkowski, M., & Bates, L. (2004). The development of complex sentence interpretation in typically developing children compared with children with specific language impairment or early unilateral focal lesions. Developmental Science, 7, 360–377.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ellis Weismer, S., & Hesketh, L. (1993). The influence of prosodic and gestural cues on novel word acquisition by children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 54, 177–190.Google Scholar
Elman, J. (1990). Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science, 14, 179–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, J. (2002) Variability in comprehension strategy use in children with specific language impairments: A dynamical systems account. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 37, 95–116.Google Scholar
Evans, J., & MacWhinney, B. (1999). Sentence processing strategies in children with expressive and expressive-receptive specific language impairments. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 34, 117–134.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferretti, R., McRae, K., & Hatherell, A. (2001). Integrating verbs, situation schemas, and thematic role concepts. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 516–547.Google Scholar
Friedman, N., & Novogrodsky, R. (2007). Is the movement in syntactic SLI related to traces or to thematic role transfer? Brain and Language, 101, 50–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedrich, M., & Friederici, A. (2005). Semantic sentence processing reflected in the event-related potentials of one- and two-year old children. NeuroReport, 16, 1801–1804.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules: Abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science, 17, 684–691.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibson, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. New York: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Gillam, R., & Pearson, N. (2004). Test of narrative language. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.Google Scholar
Glenberg, A., Becker, R., Klotzer, S., Kolanko, L., Muller, S., & Rinck, M. (2009). Episodic affordances contribute to language comprehension. Language and Cognition, 1, 113–135.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Cauley, K., & Gordon, L. (1987). The eyes have it: Lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm. Journal of Child Language, 14, 23–45.Google Scholar
Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. (1996). The origins of grammar: Evidence from early language comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kaschak, M., & Glenberg, A. (2000). Constructing meaning: The role of affordances and grammatical constructions in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 508–529.Google Scholar
Kidd, E., & Bavin, E. (2002). English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: Evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31, 599–617.Google Scholar
Koff, E., Kramer, P., & Fowles, B. (1980). Effects of event probability and animateness on children's comprehension of active and passive sentences. Journal of Psychology, 104, 157–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuperman, V., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Brysbaert, M. (2012). Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 44, 978–990.Google Scholar
Leonard, L. (2014). Children with specific language impairment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Leonard, L., Deevy, P., Fey, M., & Bredin-Oja, S. (2013). Sentence comprehension in specific language impairment: A task designed to distinguish between cognitive capacity and syntactic complexity. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 56, 577–589.Google Scholar
Love, T. (2007). The processing of non-canonically ordered constituents in long distance dependencies by pre-school children: A real-time investigation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 36, 191–206.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacDonald, M., & Christiansen, M. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35–54.Google Scholar
Mainela-Arnold, E., Evans, J. L., & Coady, J. A. (2008). Lexical representations in children with SLI: Evidence from a frequency-manipulated gating task. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51, 381–393.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mainela-Arnold, E., Evans, J., & Coady, J. (2010). Explaining lexical-semantic deficits in specific language impairment: The role of phonological similarity, phonological working memory, and lexical competition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 53, 1742–1756.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W., & Tyler, L. (1980). The temporal structure of spoken language understanding. Cognition, 25, 71–102.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W., & Welsh, A. (1978), Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology, 10, 29–63.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W., & Zwitserlood, P. (1989). Accessing spoken words: The importance of word onsets. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 15, 576–585.Google Scholar
Matsuki, K., Chow, T., Hare, M., Elman, J. L., Scheepers, C., & McRae, K. (2011). Event-based plausibility immediately influences on-line language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 37, 913–934.Google Scholar
McGregor, K., Newman, R., Reilly, R., & Capone, N. (2002). Semantic representation and naming in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45, 998–1014.Google Scholar
Metusalem, R., Kutas, M., Urbach, T., Hare, M., McRae, K., & Elman, J. (2012). Generalized event knowledge activation during online sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 66, 545–567.Google Scholar
Moe, A., Hopkins, C., & Rush, R. (1982). The vocabulary of first-grade children. Springfield, IL: Thomas.Google Scholar
Montgomery, J., & Evans, J. (2009). Complex sentence comprehension and working memory in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52, 269–288.Google Scholar
Montgomery, J., Evans, J., & Gillam, R. (2009). Relation of auditory attention and complex sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment: A preliminary study. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 123–151.Google Scholar
Montgomery, J., & Leonard, L. (2006). Effects of acoustic manipulation on the real-time inflectional processing of children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49, 1238–1256.Google Scholar
Pereyra, J., Klarman, L., Lin, L., & Kuhl, P. (2005). Sentence processing in 30-month-old children: An event-related potential study. NeuroReport, 16, 645–648.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, L., Marinis, T., Felser, C., & Clahsen, H. (2007). Antecedent priming at trace positions in children's sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistics, 36, 175–188.Google Scholar
Robertson, E., & Joanisse, M. (2010). Spoken sentence comprehension in children with dyslexia and language impairment: The roles of syntax and working memory. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 141–165.Google Scholar
Roid, G., & Miller, L. (1997). Leiter International Performance Scale—Revised. Wood Dale, IL: Stoelting.Google Scholar
Roland, D., Dick, F., & Elman, J. (2007). Frequency of basic English grammatical structures: A corpus analysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 348–379.Google Scholar
Rossion, B., & Pourtois, G. (2004). Revisiting Snodgrass and Vanderwart's object set: The role of surface detail in basic-level object recognition. Perception, 33, 217–236.Google Scholar
Schneider, W., Eschman, A., & Zuccolott, A. (2002). E-Prime user's guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools.Google Scholar
Semel, E., Wiig, E., & Secord, W. (2003). Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (4th ed.). San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1966). Grammatical transformations and sentence comprehension in childhood and adulthood. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5, 219–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Storkel, H., & Hoover, J. (2010). On-line calculator of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density based on child corpora of spoken American English. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 42, 497–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strohner, H., & Nelson, K. (1974). The young child's development of sentence comprehension: Influence of event probability, nonverbal context, syntactic form, and strategies. Child Development, 45, 567–576.Google Scholar
Thal, D., & Flores, M. (2001). Development of interpretation strategies in typically developing and late-talking toddlers. Journal of Child Language, 28, 173–193.Google Scholar
Traxler, M., & Tooley, K. (2007). Lexical mediation and context effects in sentence processing. Brain Research, 1146, 59–72.Google Scholar
van der Lely, H. (2005). Domain-specific cognitive systems: Insight from grammatical-SLI. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 53–59.Google Scholar
Vitevitch, M., & Luce, P. (2004). A web-based interface to calculate phonotactic probability for words and nonwords in English. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 36, 481–487.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Von Berger, E., Wulfeck, B., Bates, E., & Fink, N. (1996). Developmental changes in real-time sentence processing. First Language, 16, 193–222.Google Scholar
Wallace, G., & Hammill, D. (1994). Comprehensive Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test—2. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.Google Scholar
Warner, R. (2012). Applied statistics: From bivariate through multivariate techniques (2nd ed.). New York: Sage.Google Scholar
Wells, J., Christiansen, M., Race, D., Acheson, D., & MacDonald, M. (2009). Experience and sentence processing: Statistical learning and relative clause comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 250–271.Google Scholar
Whelan, R. (2008). Effective analysis of reaction time data. Psychological Record, 58, 475–482.Google Scholar
Yuan, S., & Fisher, C. (2009). “Really? She blicked the baby?” Two-year-olds learn combinatorial facts about verbs by listening. Psychological Science, 20, 619–626.Google Scholar
Yuan, S., Fisher, C., & Snedeker, J. (2012). Counting the nouns: Simple structural cues to verb meaning. Child Development, 83, 1382–1399.Google Scholar
Zwitserlood, P. (1989). The locus of the effects of sentential-semantic context in spoken-word processing. Cognition, 32, 25–64.Google Scholar