TY - JOUR
T1 - Abstract sentence representations in 3-year-olds
T2 - Evidence from language production and comprehension
AU - Bencini, Giulia M.L.
AU - Valian, Virginia V.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by an NIH-NRSA post-doctoral fellowship (G.B.) and by NSF award SBE-0123609 to Hunter College (V.V.V.). Portions of this work were presented at the 3rd Annual Workshop in Language Production, Chicago, IL; the 12th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA; and the 47th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Houston, TX.
PY - 2008/7
Y1 - 2008/7
N2 - We use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35-42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12 children who received no priming (0). Priming was comparable to that reported for older children and adults. Comprehension of reversible passives with animate participants before and after priming was above chance but did not improve as a result of priming. Young 3-year-olds represent sentences abstractly, have syntactic representations for noun, verb, "surface subject", and "surface object", have semantic representations for "agent" and "patient", and flexibly map the relation between syntax and semantics. Taken together with research on syntactic categories in 2-year-olds, our results provide empirical support for continuity in language acquisition.
AB - We use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35-42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12 children who received no priming (0). Priming was comparable to that reported for older children and adults. Comprehension of reversible passives with animate participants before and after priming was above chance but did not improve as a result of priming. Young 3-year-olds represent sentences abstractly, have syntactic representations for noun, verb, "surface subject", and "surface object", have semantic representations for "agent" and "patient", and flexibly map the relation between syntax and semantics. Taken together with research on syntactic categories in 2-year-olds, our results provide empirical support for continuity in language acquisition.
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Passives
KW - Semantics
KW - Sentence comprehension
KW - Sentence production
KW - Syntactic priming
KW - Syntax
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=67650351906&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.007
DO - 10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.007
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:67650351906
SN - 1888-4415
VL - 59
SP - 97
EP - 113
JO - Revista Espanola de Cirugia Ortopedica y Traumatologia
JF - Revista Espanola de Cirugia Ortopedica y Traumatologia
IS - 1
ER -