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  • br Introduction Language s impressive productivity is primar

    2018-10-29


    Introduction Language\'s impressive productivity is primarily the result of syntax, a set of processes that allow listeners to encode the relationship between the words in a sentence. Adults rapidly access the syntactic structure of unfolding sentences (e.g., Brown and Hagoort, 1999; Friederici, 1995). But how and when do language learners acquire the syntax of their native language? At the onset of speech production, children typically do not utter well-formed sentences. For instance, toddlers around two years of age tend to use ‘telegraphic’ speech, omitting many grammatical items (e.g., articles, auxiliaries) from their spontaneous productions. This lack of grammatical items was originally interpreted as a sign of their inability to process – or even perceive – these short, and often reduced words. However, a mounting body of more recent experimental studies testing toddlers’ comprehension of grammatical words has shown that children are sensitive to the function words of their language from very early on (Gerken et al., 1990; Shi, 2014, for a review), suggesting that the absence of these words reflects difficulties in planning and uttering multi-word utterances, rather than a lack of receptive knowledge. The accessibility of grammatical words early in life could be of great use for children\'s language development, in particular for syntactic categorization (Christophe et al., 2008). Specifically, because nouns tend to be preceded by determiners and verbs by pronouns, children might exploit these differential contextual statistics to group the two types of words into different syntactic glutathione s-transferase (Redington et al., 1998). Experimental work supports this hypothesis. Young children familiarized with novel words preceded by one determiner later distinguish cases in which this new word is (correctly) preceded by a different determiner from those in which it is (erroneously) preceded by a pronoun (Höhle et al., 2004; Shi and Melançon, 2010; see also Cauvet et al., 2014). Grammatical words can furthermore help toddlers constrain the meaning of unknown content words. That is, toddlers map a displayed action onto a label when the grammatical structure of the accompanying sentence, as established by its function words, is consistent with a verb context, but not when it is consistent with a noun context (Bernal et al., 2007; Waxman et al., 2009). It is unclear, however, if children in those studies relied on the local co-occurrences of function and content words or whether a more complex syntactic structure was used, as has been shown in older, 4–5-year-old children (e.g., Huttenlocher et al., 2004; Lidz and Musolino, 2002). To better understand whether and how young children compute syntactic structure, we explore the nature and time course of syntactic processing in 24-month-old toddlers. To examine children\'s early syntactic abilities, we recorded toddlers’ ERPs while they listened to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. In adults, ungrammatical sentences typically evoke a P600, a late posterior ERP component that is thought to reflect revision processes or sustained integration processes needed to interpret these sentences (Hagoort and Brown, 2000; Osterhout, 1997; Hagoort, 2011; Kaan et al., 2000; Kuperberg, 2007 for a review). Many studies additionally report an earlier negative component, either an Early Left Anterior Negativity (ELAN) that is thought to reflect the violation of syntactic expectations based on local dependencies (Hahne and Friederici, 1999; Neville et al., 1991; Steinhauer and Drury, 2012 for a review) or an N400, typically associated with the integration of the current word within the on-going semantic representation (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980; Debruille et al., 2008; Kutas and Federmeier, 2000 for a review). In toddlers, like in adults, syntactic violations trigger evoked potentials that are different from those observed for syntactically well-formed co-occurrences. For instance, Oberecker et al. (2005) and Oberecker and Friederici (2006) exposed German-learning 2-year-olds to sentences containing local grammatical errors such as *Der Löwe im brüllt (‘The lion in-the roars’) and observed a greater positivity, interpreted as a P600, for these sentences compared to sentences containing grammatically intact phrases, such as Der Löwe brüllt im Zoo (‘The lion roars in the zoo’). However, the observed effect might be related to memory processes rather than syntactic processing per se: Ungrammatical pairs of words (e.g., “im brüllt”) may create a surprise because they have never been heard before. Bernal et al. (2010) partially addressed this issue by exploiting the ambiguity of certain French function words and constructing ungrammatical sentences in which all adjacent pairs of words occurred together in child-directed speech (e.g., la poire ‘the pear’ is grammatical, so is je la mange ‘I eat it’, but je la poire ‘I pear it’ is ungrammatical), and they observed a significant grammaticality effect. However, even though all word pairs in this study were legal, ungrammatical sentences did contain novel triplets of words, which may have been noticed by toddlers (Gómez and Gerken, 2000).