Getting There Faster: 18- and 24-Month-Old Infants' Use of Function Words to Determine Reference

Yarden Kedar · Marianella Casasola · Barbara Lust

97 citations0/0 files storedChild Development

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner the preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which the was either dropped, replaced by a nonsense function word (el), or replaced by an alternate English function word (and). Both the 18- and 24-month-old infants oriented faster and more accurately to a visual target following grammatical sentences. The results suggest that by 18 months of age, infants use their knowledge of determiners in sentence computation and in establishing reference.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 97 citations exist upstream.

References

1988Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.1973A First Language 1974A First Language: The Early Stages 1985The mental representation of grammatical relations . Edited by Joan Bresnan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. Pp. 874. $35.00.1987The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect 2014A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory 1986Language Learnability and Language Development 1990The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings

Cited by

2015Where are the cookies? Two- and three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns 2018Evaluating socioeconomic gaps in preschoolers’ vocabulary, syntax and language process skills with the Quick Interactive Language Screener (QUILS)2006The Recognition of Discontinuous Verbal Dependencies by German 19-Month-Olds: Evidence for Lexical and Structural Influences on Children's Early Processing Capacities 2009French‐learning toddlers use gender information on determiners during word recognition 2011Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers’ referential intentions

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.