Knowing a lot for one’s age: Vocabulary skill and not age is associated with anticipatory incremental sentence interpretation in children and adults

Abstract

Adults can incrementally combine information from speech with astonishing speed in order to anticipate future words. Concurrently, a growing body of work suggests that vocabulary ability is crucially related to lexical processing skills in young children. However, relatively little is known about this relationship with predictive sentence processing in children or adults. We explore this question by comparing the degree to which an upcoming sentential Theme is anticipated by a combination of information from a preceding Agent and Action. 48 children, aged of 3 to 10, and 48 college-aged adults’ eye-movements were recorded as they looked at a four-alternative forced-choice display while they heard a sentence in which the object referred to one of the pictures (e.g. The pirate hides the treasure) in the presence of an Agent-related, Action-related and Unrelated distractor image. Pictures were rotated across stimuli so that, across all versions of the study, each picture appeared in all conditions, yielding a completely balanced within-subjects design. Adults and children very quickly made use of combinatory information as soon as it became available at the action to generate anticipatory looks to the target object. Speed of anticipatory fixations did not vary with age. However, when controlling for age, individuals with higher vocabularies were faster to look to the target than those with lower vocabulary scores. Together, these results support and extend current views of incremental processing in which adults and children make use of linguistic information to continuously update their mental representation of ongoing language.