Syntactic priming during language comprehension in three- and four-year-old children

Journal of Memory and Language

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 188-213

  Thothathiri, Malathi ^a   Snedeker, Jesse ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Children; Comprehension; Structural priming; Syntactic priming; Syntax

Indexed keywords

EID: 38649088616     PISSN: 0749596X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2007.06.012     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. Allopenna P.D., Magnuson J.S., and Tanenhaus M.K. Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory & Language 38 (1998) 419-439
2. Altmann G.T.M., and Kamide Y. Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition 73 (1999) 247-264
3. Appel L.P., Cooper R.G., McCarrell N., Sims-Knight J., Yussen S.R., and Flavell J.H. The development of the distinction between perceiving and memorizing. Child Development 43 (1972) 1365-1381
4. Arai, M., Van Gompel, R. P. G., & Scheepers, C. (2005). Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension. Paper presented at the 18th annual CUNY sentence processing conference. Tucson, AZ.
5. Baker M. Incorporation: A theory of grammatical function changing (1988), University of Chicago Press, Chicago
6. Baker M. Thematic roles and syntactic structure. In: Haegeman L. (Ed). Elements of grammar (1997), Kluwer, Dordrecht 73-137
7. Bock J.K. Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18 (1986) 355-387
8. Bock K., and Loebell H. Framing sentences. Cognition 35 (1990) 1-39
9. Bock K., Loebell H., and Morey R. From conceptual roles to structural relations: Bridging the syntactic cleft. Psychological Review 99 (1992) 150-171
10. Bock K., and Griffin Z.M. The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 129 (2000) 177-192
11. Boland J. Visual arguments. Cognition 95 (2005) 237-274
12. Bowerman M. Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules?. Linguistics 28 (1990) 1253-1289
13. Bowerman M. Early syntactic development: A cross-linguistic study with special reference to Finnish (1973), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
14. Boyland, J. T. & Anderson, J. R. (1998). Evidence that syntactic priming is long-lasting. In Proceedings of the twentieth annual conference of the cognitive science society (p. 1205). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
15. Braine M. The ontogeny of English phrase structure: The first phase. Language 39 (1963) 1-13
16. Braine M.D.S. Children's first word combinations. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 41 (1976) (1, Serial No. 164)
17. Braine M.D.S. What sort of innate structure is needed to "bootstrap" into syntax?. Cognition 45 (1992) 77-100
18. Branigan H.P., Pickering M.J., Stewart A.J., and McLean J.F. Syntactic priming in spoken production: Linguistic and temporal interference. Memory & Cognition 28 (2000) 1297-1302
19. Branigan H.P., Pickering M.J., and Cleland A.A. Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue. Cognition 75 (2000) B13-B25
20. Branigan H.P., Pickering M.J., and McLean J.F. Priming prepositional-phrase attachment during comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition 31 (2005) 468-481
21. Branigan, H. P., McLean, J. F., & Jones, M. W. (2005). A blue cat or a cat that is blue? Evidence for abstract syntax in young children's noun phrases. In Proceedings of the 29th annual Boston university conference on language development (pp. 109-121). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
22. Branigan H.P. Syntactic priming. Language and Linguistics Compass 1 1-2 (2007) 1-16
23. Brooks P.J., and Tomasello M. Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs. Developmental Psychology 35 (1999) 29-44
24. Brooks P.J., and Tomasello M. How children constrain their argument structure constructions. Language 75 (1999) 720-738
25. Brown R. A first language: The early stages (1973), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
26. Campbell A.L., and Tomasello M. The acquisition of English dative constructions. Applied Psycholinguistics 22 (2001) 253-267
27. Chang F., Bock K., and Goldberg A.E. Can thematic roles leave traces of their places?. Cognition 90 (2003) 29-49
28. Chang F., Dell G.S., and Bock K. Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review 113 (2006) 234-272
29. Collins P. The indirect object construction in English: An informational approach. Linguistics 33 (1995) 35-49
30. Conwell E., and Demuth K. Early syntactic productivity: Evidence from dative shift. Cognition 103 (2007) 163-179
31. Dixon R.M.W. Ergativity (1994), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
32. Dowty D. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67 (1991) 547-619
33. Fernald, A., Zangl, R., Thorpe, K., Hurtado, N., & Williams, C. (2006). Learning to listen ahead in English and Spanish: Infants use multiple linguistic and non-linguistic cues in online sentence interpretation. Paper presented at the online methods in children's language processing workshop. New York, NY.
34. Fernandes K.J., Marcus G.F., DiNubila J.A., and Vouloumanos A. From semantics to syntax and back again: Argument structure in the third year of life. Cognition 100 (2006) B10-B20
35. Fillmore C.J. The case for case. In: Bach E., and Harms R.T. (Eds). Universals in linguistic theory (1968), Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1-88
36. Fisher C., Gleitman H., and Gleitman L.R. On the semantic content of subcategorization frames. Cognitive Psychology 23 (1991) 331-392
37. Fisher C., Hall G., Rakowitz S., and Gleitman L. When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua 92 (1994) 333-375
38. Fisher, C. (2000). Who's blicking whom? Word order influences toddlers' interpretations of novel verbs. Paper presented at the 11th international conference on infant studies. Brighton, UK.
39. Fisher C. Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of abstract structure in 2.5-year-olds' interpretations of novel verbs. Developmental Science 5 (2002) 55-64
40. Fisher C. The role of abstract syntactic knowledge in language acquisition: A reply to Tomasello. Cognition 82 (2002) 259-278
41. Flavell J., Miller P., and Miller S. Cognitive development. 6th ed. (2002), Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ
42. Flavell J.H., Beach D.R., and Chinsky J.H. Spontaneous verbal rehearsal in a memory task as a function of age. Child Development 37 (1966) 283-299
43. Flavell J.H., and Wellman H.M. Metamemory. In: Kail Jr. R.V., and Hagen W. (Eds). Perspectives on the development of memory and cognition (1977), Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ
44. Gamez, P. B., Shimpi, P. M., & Huttenlocher, J. (2005). Emerging syntactic representations as evident through priming. Poster presented at the 2005 SRCD biennial meeting. Atlanta, GA.
45. Gertner Y., Fisher C., and Eisengart J. Learning words and rules: Abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science 17 (2006) 684-691
46. Gillette J., Gleitman H., Gleitman L., and Lederer A. Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Cognition 73 (1999) 135-176
47. Gleitman L. The structural sources of word meaning. Language Acquisition 1 (1990) 3-55
48. Goldberg A. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure (1995), University of Chicago Press, Chicago
49. Goldberg A. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language (2006), Oxford University Press, Oxford
50. Gombert J. Metalinguistic development (1992), Harvester/Wheatsheaf, New York
51. Gries S.T., and Stefanowitsch A. Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on 'alternations'. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9 (2004) 97-129
52. Grimshaw J. Argument structure (1990), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
53. Grimshaw J. Form, function, and the language acquisition device. In: Baker C.L., and McCarthy J. (Eds). The logical problem of language acquisition (1981), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 165-182
54. Gropen J., Pinker S., Hollander M., Goldberg R., and Wilson R. The learnability and acquisition of the dative alternation in English. Language 65 (1989) 203-257
55. Hasher L., and Zacks R. Automatic and effortful processes in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 108 (1979) 356-388
56. Henderson J.M., and Ferreira F. The interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world (2004), Psychology Press, New York
57. Hirsh-Pasek K., and Golinkoff R.M. The origins of grammar: Evidence from early language comprehension (1996), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
58. Huttenlocher J., Vasilyeva M., and Shimpi P. Syntactic priming in young children. Journal of Memory and Language 50 (2004) 182-195
59. Jackendoff R. Foundations of language-brain, meaning, grammar, evolution (2002), Oxford University Press, Oxford
60. Kelly M.H., and Martin S. Domain-general abilities applied to domain-specific tasks: Sensitivity to probabilities in perception, cognition, and language. Lingua 92 (1994) 105-140
61. Konopka, A., & Bock, K. (2005). Helping syntax out: How much do words do? Paper presented at the 18th annual CUNY sentence processing conference. Tucson, AZ.
62. Levin, B. (1983). On the nature of ergativity. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
63. Levin B. English verb classes and alternations (1993), University of Chicago Press, Chicago
64. MacDonald M.C., Pearlmutter N.J., and Seidenberg M.S. The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review 101 (1994) 676-703
65. Marantz A. On the nature of grammatical relations (1984), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
66. Masson M.E., and Loftus G.R. Using confidence intervals for graphically based data interpretation. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 57 (2003) 202-220
67. Matin E., Shao K.C., and Boff K.R. Saccadic overhead: Information-processing time with and without saccades. Perception & Psychophysics 53 (1993) 372-380
68. McNeill D. Developmental psycholinguistics. In: Smith F., and Miller G.A. (Eds). The genesis of language: A psycholinguistic approach (1966), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
69. Miller P.H., and Seier W.L. Strategy utilization deficiencies in children: When, where, and why. In: Reese H.W. (Ed). Advances in child development and behavior Vol. 25 (1994), Academic Press, New York 107-156
70. Ninio A. Testing the role of semantic similarity in syntactic development. Journal of Child Language 32 (2005) 35-61
71. Ninio A. Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity. Journal of Child Language 26 (1999) 619-653
72. Pickering M.J., and Branigan H.P. The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory & Language 39 (1998) 633-651
73. Pinker S. Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
74. Potter M.C., and Lombardi L. Syntactic priming in immediate recall of sentences. Journal of Memory and Language 38 (1998) 265-282
75. Savage C., Lieven E., Theakston A., and Tomasello M. Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: Lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children. Developmental Science 6 (2003) 557-567
76. Savage C., Lieven E., Theakston A., and Tomasello M. Structural priming as implicit learning in language acquisition. Language Learning & Development 2 (2006) 27-49
77. Scheepers C. Syntactic priming of relative clause attachments: Persistence of structural configuration in sentence production. Cognition 89 (2003) 179-205
78. Scheepers C., and Crocker M.W. Constituent order priming from reading to listening: A visual-world study. In: Carreiras M., and Clifton C.J. (Eds). The on-line study of sentence comprehension: Eyetracking, ERP and beyond (2004), Psychology Press, Hove 167-185
79. Slobin D.I. Cross-linguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In: Slobin D. (Ed). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition Vol. 2 (1985), Lawrence Erlbaum, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1157-1256
80. Snedeker J., and Gleitman L. Why it is hard to label our concepts. In: Hall D.G., and Waxman S.R. (Eds). Weaving a lexicon (2004), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 255-293
81. Snedeker J., and Trueswell J.C. The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology 49 (2004) 238-299
82. Snedeker, J., & Yuan, S. (in press). The development of interactive parsing: Children use lexical and prosodic cues in online sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.08.001.
83. Song, H.-J., & Fisher, C. (2004). Syntactic priming in 3-year-old children. Paper presented at the 29th annual Boston university conference on language development. Boston, MA.
84. Swingley D., Pinto J.P., and Fernald A. Continuous processing in word recognition at 24 months. Cognition 71 (1999) 73-108
85. Tanenhaus M.K., Spivey-Knowlton M.J., Eberhard K.M., and Sedivy J.C. Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science 268 (1995) 1632-1634
86. Thothathiri, M., & Snedeker, J. (2006). Structural priming during comprehension of datives. Poster presented at the 19th annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing. New York, NY.
87. Thothathiri, M., & Snedeker, J. (submitted for publication). Give and take: Syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension.
88. Tomasello M. First verbs: A case study in early grammatical development (1992), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
89. Tomasello M. Do young children have adult syntactic competence?. Cognition 74 (2000) 209-253
90. Tomasello M. The item-based nature of children's early syntactic development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000) 156-163
91. Tomasello M., and Brooks P. Young children's earliest transitive and intransitive constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 9 (1998) 379-395
92. Tomasello M., and Abbot-Smith K. A tale of two theories: Response to Fisher. Cognition 83 (2002) 207-214
93. Tomasello M., and Akhtar N. What paradox? A response to Naigles (2002). Cognition 88 (2003) 317-323
94. Trueswell J., Sekerina I., Hill N.M., and Logrip M.L. The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition 73 (1999) 89-134
95. Trueswell J.C., and Kim A.E. How to prune a garden-path by nipping it in the bud: Fast-priming of verb argument structures. Journal of Memory and Language 39 (1998) 102-123
96. Trueswell J.C., and Tanenhaus M.K. Toward a lexicalist framework of constraint-based syntactic ambiguity resolution. In: Clifton C.J., Frazier L., and Rayner K. (Eds). Perspectives on sentence processing (1994), Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ 155-179
97. Vasilyeva M., Huttenlocher J., and Waterfall H. Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers. Developmental Psychology 42 (2006) 164-174
98. Yuan, S., Fisher, C.L., Gertner, Y., & Snedeker, J.C. (2007). Participants are more than physical bodies: 21-month-olds assign relational meaning to novel transitive verbs. Paper Presented at the 2007 SRCD Biennial Meeting. Boston, MA.
99. Zelazo P.D., Frye D., and Rapus T. An age-related dissociation between knowing rules and using them. Cognitive Development 11 (1996) 37-63