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Lexical activation effects on children's sentence planning and production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2015

MONIQUE CHAREST ,
JUDITH R. JOHNSTON  and
JEFF A. SMALL
MONIQUE CHAREST*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
JUDITH R. JOHNSTON
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
JEFF A. SMALL
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Monique Charest, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Alberta, 2-70 Corbett Hall, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4, Canada. E-mail: mcharest@ualberta.ca
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Abstract

We investigated the relationship between lexical activation and syntactic planning in children's sentences. Four- and 7-year-old children described transitive scenes following patient-related prime pictures and control pictures. We examined syntactic choices, and compared onset latency, sentence length, and dysfluency rates for active transitive sentences in the two conditions. Early activation of the patient in the primed condition did not lead to the production of patient-subject sentences, but it did have consequences for active transitive sentence production. Namely, onset latencies were longer and sentences were shorter in the primed condition. Dysfluency rates did not differ between the two conditions. Correlation analyses revealed a stronger pattern of association between working memory scores and language variables in the patient-primed condition. The results indicate that conflicts between lexical activation order and syntactic plans are a source of processing difficulty during children's sentence production.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 551 - 576
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

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