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Incremental processing in head-final child language: online comprehension of relative clauses in Turkish-speaking children and adults

Ozge, D., Marinis, T. and Zeyrek, D. (2015) Incremental processing in head-final child language: online comprehension of relative clauses in Turkish-speaking children and adults. Language and Cognitive Processes, 30 (9). pp. 1230-1243. ISSN 0169-0965

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To link to this item DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2014.995108

Abstract/Summary

The present study investigates the parsing of pre-nominal relative clauses (RCs) in children for the first time with a realtime methodology that reveals moment-to-moment processing patterns as the sentence unfolds. A self-paced listening experiment with Turkish-speaking children (aged 5–8) and adults showed that both groups display a sign of processing cost both in subject and object RCs at different points through the flow of the utterance when integrating the cues that are uninformative (i.e., ambiguous in function) and that are structurally and probabilistically unexpected. Both groups show a processing facilitation as soon as the morphosyntactic dependencies are completed and parse the unbounded dependencies rapidly using the morphosyntactic cues rather than waiting for the clause-final filler. These findings show that five-year-old children show similar patterns to adults in processing the morphosyntactic cues incrementally and in forming expectations about the rest of the utterance on the basis of the probabilistic model of their language.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM)
Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN)
Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences
Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition
ID Code:45533
Additional Information:Special Issue: Laboratory in the Field: Advances in cross-linguistic psycholinguistics
Publisher:Tayor & Francis

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