German-speaking children use sentence-initial case marking for predictive language processing at age four

Date

2022-04-01

Author

Özge, Duygu
Kornfilt, Jaklin
Maquate, Katja
Kuntay, Aylin C.
Snedeker, Jesse

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

177
views

0
downloads

Adults incrementally integrate multiple sources of information to predict the upcoming linguistic structure. Although we have substantial evidence that children can use lexicosemantic information triggered by the verb, we have limited information as to whether children can use morphosyntax to generate predictions during the course of processing. Previous studies show that four-year-old Turkish-speaking children can use case-marking cues predictively; however German-speaking children have been reported to fail until late in development. The present visual-world eye-tracking study provides the first evidence from four-year-old German-speaking children (mean age: 4;03) interpreting sentence initial case marking cues independent of the identity of the verb and the canonical word order to predict the thematic role of the upcoming argument. We presented children with a visual context with a stereotypical but ambiguous event, the thematic structure of which can be resolved only on the basis of the case marking cues on subject-initial and object-initial structures locating the verb sentence-finally. Children were able to use the accusative case on the non-canonical object-initial utterances to predict that the upcoming argument should have the agent role before this argument and the verb became available. This study shows that the previously reported discrepancy between these two case-marking languages (i.e., Turkish and German) is not due to the crosslinguistic differences but due to methodological differences employed across studies. These findings provide support for language acquisition theories assuming early abstractions and adult-like parsing mechanisms predictively integrating multiple sources of cues.

Subject Keywords

Child language processing, Development of parsing abilities, Acquisition of German case marking, Predictive use of case marking, Incremental processing in children, WORD-ORDER, COMPREHENSION, VERBS, KNOWLEDGE, INFORMATION, ACTIVATION, SCHEMAS, MODELS

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96122

Journal

COGNITION

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104988

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Foreign language speaking anxiety and learner motivation: a case study at a Turkish state university Öztürk, Gökhan; Gürbüz, Nurdan; Department of English Language Teaching (2012) This study aimed to identify the relationship between foreign language speaking anxiety and foreign language learning motivation. In addition to this, the motivational level of learners, the effect of gender on this motivational level and the relationship between motivational orientations were examined. Besides, the level of foreign language speaking anxiety that the students experience, the effect of gender on this anxiety and the relationship between foreign language speaking anxiety and students’ motivat...
Learning transferability of cognitive tasks by graph generation for brain decoding Coşkun, Bilgin; Yarman Vural, Fatoş Tunay; Department of Computer Engineering (2021-12-10) Brain decoding involves analyzing the cognitive states of human brain by using some statistical techniques in order to understand the relations among the cognitive states, based on neuroimaging data. A very powerful tool to acquire the brain data is functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI), which generates three-dimensional brain volume at each time instant, while a subject performs a cognitive task involving social activities, emotion processing, game playing, memory etc. However, it is very difficult a...
Examining Cognitive Creativity as an Individual Difference in Second Language Acquisition Pıpes, Ashleıgh Carter(2017-12-31) This study examines cognitive creativity as an individual difference and its role in processes and outcomes of second language acquisition. The study explores relationships between participants’ creativity, as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, and their course grades, narrative structure use, and communication strategy use.
Efl learners’ imagined communities and investments: multiple perspectives from an intensive English language program in Turkey Aslan, Reyhan; Seferoğlu, Gölge; Department of English Language Teaching (2020-9) This study set out to investigate the relationship between imagined identities and L2 investments in an in-depth analysis of the three learners’ English learning stories who had diverse motivational profiles in a pre-undergraduate language education program in Turkey. Besides, this inquiry sought to explore the imagined communities informing the policy documents and the program members’ perspectives in order to reveal how their L2-mediated visions interacted with each other. With this purpose in mind, this ...
Language learning from the perspective of nonlinear dynamic systems Hohenberger, Annette Edeltraud; Peltzer-Karpf, Annemarie (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2009-01-01) This article outlines a nonlinear dynamic systems approach to language learning on the basis of developmental cognitive neuroscience. Language learning, on this view, is a process of experience-dependent shaping and selection of broadly defined domain-general and domain-specific genetic predispositions. The central concept of development is (neuro) cognitive,e growth in terms of self-organization. Linguistic structure-building is synergetic and emergent insofar as the acquisition of a critical mass of eleme...

Citation Formats

D. Özge, J. Kornfilt, K. Maquate, A. C. Kuntay, and J. Snedeker, “German-speaking children use sentence-initial case marking for predictive language processing at age four,” COGNITION, vol. 221, pp. 0–0, 2022, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96122.