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

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Abstract

We report two sets of experiments that demonstrate syntactic priming from comprehension to comprehension in young children. Children acted out double-object and prepositional-object dative sentences while we monitored their eye movements. We measured whether hearing one type of dative as a prime influenced children’s online interpretation of subsequent dative utterances. In target sentences, the onset of the direct object noun was consistent with both an animate recipient and an inanimate theme, creating a temporary ambiguity in the argument structure of the verb (double-object e.g., Show the horse the book; prepositional-object e.g., Show the horn to the dog). The first set of experiments demonstrated priming in four-year-old children (M = 4.1), both when the same verb was used in prime and target sentences (Experiment 1a) and when different verbs were used (Experiment 1b). The second set found parallel priming in three-year-old children (M = 3.1). These results indicate that young children employ abstract structural representations during online sentence comprehension.

Section snippets

Novel-verb generalization as a window onto grammatical representations

Observational studies of spontaneous speech have sometimes been cited as evidence for early abstractions (e.g., Bowerman, 1973). However, Tomasello (1992) pointed out that in the absence of a complete record of children’s input, we cannot be sure whether children are generalizing or merely imitating the structures used by others around them. This issue is better addressed by experimental studies using novel verbs. In the past decade, a series of novel-verb production studies have shown that

Structural priming and children’s representations

Structural priming refers to the effect that the use of a particular construction or structure has on subsequent uses of the same structure (Bock, 1986). For example, adults are more likely to use a passive sentence after a passive sentence than after an active sentence. This priming is structural in that it occurs even when the meanings of the prime sentences are controlled and the prime and target sentences have no content words in common. This technique has some advantages over the methods

Experiment 1

In Experiment 1, we asked whether four-year-olds show within-verb priming (Experiment 1a) and across-verb priming (Experiment 1b). Critical instructions were double-object or prepositional-object dative sentences with the verb give. We chose to use the dative alternation for two reasons. First, a number of studies have concluded that by three years of age, children comprehend and produce both kinds of dative constructions (Campbell and Tomasello, 2001, Gropen et al., 1989). Second, the

Experiment 2

Experiment 1 demonstrated within- and across-verb priming in four-year-old children. However, much of the debate about the abstractness of children’s representations has centered on three-year-olds. In addition, all target sentences in Experiment 1 used give. The verb give is likely the most frequent dative verb in the input given to children. Under some theories, give conveys the prototypical meaning or central sense of the double-object construction (Goldberg, 1995). It has also been

General discussion

The results reported here demonstrate within- and across-verb priming in both three- and four-year-old children. Prior dative sentences influenced the online comprehension of subsequent dative sentences containing either the same or a different verb. The across-verb priming results can only be explained by representations that are not verb-specific. Therefore, these results suggest that both three- and four-year-old children use abstract representations during comprehension.

Conclusions

In this paper, we found that children’s online interpretation of a dative sentence with a temporary argument structure ambiguity was influenced by prior dative sentences. This priming effect was seen both in three-year-olds and four-year-olds, when the same verb was used in different sentences, and when different verbs were used. The across-verb priming results demonstrate that children as young as three years employ abstract representations during the comprehension of sentences with known

Acknowledgments

We thank Cynthia Fisher for helpful discussions, Steven Pinker for comments on an earlier manuscript, Stefan Th. Gries for sharing corpus analyses of datives, and Sneha Rao, Jane Sung, Adrianna Saada and Megan Powell for their assistance in collecting and coding data.

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      Alternatively, the practice trials might have helped children to cope with the linguistic demands imposed by the test question. Research with both children and adults suggests that hearing or producing a particular sentence structure facilitates subsequent processing of that sentence structure (e.g., Bock, 1986; Branigan & McLean, 2016; Rissman, Legendre, & Landau, 2013; Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008; Tooley, Swaab, Boudewyn, Zirnstein, & Traxler, 2014). For instance, hearing the sentence “Give the ball to the lion” facilitates 3-year-olds’ subsequent interpretation of a sentence with the same structure (e.g., “Give the birdhouse to the sheep”) but not of a sentence with a different structure (e.g., “Give the sheep the birdhouse”) (Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008).

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