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Bénédicte Grandon; Marcel Schlechtweg; Esther Ruigendijk – Journal of Child Language, 2023
The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old…
Descriptors: Eye Movements, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Nouns
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Polišenská, Kamila; Chiat, Shula; Szewczyk, Jakub; Twomey, Katherine E. – Journal of Child Language, 2021
Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…
Descriptors: Semantics, Language Processing, Linguistic Theory, Syntax
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Zhu, Jingtao; Franck, Julie; Rizzi, Luigi; Gavarro, Anna – Journal of Child Language, 2022
We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…
Descriptors: Infants, Grammar, Mandarin Chinese, Verbs
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Hsin, Lisa B.; Gonzalez-Gomez, Nayeli; Barriere, Isabelle; Nazzi, Thierry; Legendre, Geraldine – Journal of Child Language, 2021
A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring…
Descriptors: Spanish, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Language Variation
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Blything, Liam P.; Iraola Azpiroz, Maialen; Allen, Shanley; Hert, Regina; Järvikivi, Juhani – Journal of Child Language, 2022
In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds' real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to "SVO" or "OVS" sentences containing active…
Descriptors: Cues, Semantics, Verbs, German
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Desmeules-Trudel, Félix; Moore, Charlotte; Zamuner, Tania S. – Journal of Child Language, 2020
Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues' respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we…
Descriptors: Monolingualism, Bilingualism, Children, Young Children
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Aguert, Marc; Le Vallois, Coralie; Martel, Karine; Laval, Virginie – Journal of Child Language, 2018
Hyperbole supports irony comprehension in adults by heightening the contrast between what is said and the actual situation. Because young children do not perceive the communication situation as a whole, but rather give precedence to either the utterance or the context, we predicted that hyperbole would reduce irony comprehension in six-year-olds…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Language Processing, Figurative Language
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Falkum, Ingrid L.; Recasens, Marta; Clark, Eve V. – Journal of Child Language, 2017
This study investigates preschoolers' ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9-5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Preschool Children, Adults, Task Analysis
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Moscati, Vincenzo; Zhan, Likan; Zhou, Peng – Journal of Child Language, 2017
In this paper we investigated the real-time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we monitored children's eye-movements while processing a sentence with modal expressions of different force ("might/must"). Children were also asked to judge the truth-value of the target sentences at the end of…
Descriptors: Young Children, Eye Movements, Sentences, Responses
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Deckert, Matthias; Schmoeger, Michaela; Schaunig-Busch, Ines; Willinger, Ulrike – Journal of Child Language, 2019
Metaphor development in conjunction with verbal intelligence and linguistic competence in middle childhood and at the transition to early adolescence was investigated. 298 individuals between seven and ten years (chronological age) who attended grades two-four (mental age) were tested for metaphor processing by the Metaphoric Triads Task, for…
Descriptors: Verbal Ability, Linguistic Competence, Language Processing, Prediction
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Hessel, Annina K.; Murphy, Victoria A. – Journal of Child Language, 2019
We explored the vocabulary and metaphor comprehension of learners of English as an additional language (EAL) in the first two years of UK primary school. EAL vocabulary knowledge is believed to be a crucial predictor of (reading) comprehension and educational attainment (Murphy, 2018). The vocabulary of five- to seven-year-old children with EAL…
Descriptors: English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Vocabulary Development
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Ito, Kiwako; Bibyk, Sarah A.; Wagner, Laura; Speer, Shari R. – Journal of Child Language, 2014
Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the…
Descriptors: Suprasegmentals, Comprehension, Eye Movements, Children
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Glenwright, Melanie; Pexman, Penny M. – Journal of Child Language, 2010
Adults distinguish between ironic remarks directed at targets (sarcasm) and ironic remarks not directed at specific targets. We investigated the development of children's appreciation for this distinction by presenting these speech acts to 71 five- to six-year-olds and 71 nine- to ten-year-olds. Five- to six-year-olds were beginning to understand…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Speech Acts, Negative Attitudes, Figurative Language
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Schults, Astra; Tulviste, Tiia; Konstabel, Kenn – Journal of Child Language, 2012
Parents of 592 children between the age of 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 4 completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (ECDI Infant Form). The relationships between comprehension and production of different categories of words and gestures were examined. According to the results of regression modelling the…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Nouns, Prediction, Cognitive Processes
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Clahsen, Harald; Luck, Monika; Hahne, Anja – Journal of Child Language, 2007
This study examines the mental processes involved in children's on-line recognition of inflected word forms using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixty children in three age groups (20 six- to seven-year-olds, 20 eight- to nine-year-olds, 20 eleven- to twelve-year-olds) and 23 adults (tested in a previous study) listened to sentences containing…
Descriptors: Sentences, Vocabulary Development, Brain, Language Processing
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