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ERIC Number: EJ1380837
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Jul
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: EISSN-1469-7602
Infants Aged 12 Months Use the Gender Feature in Determiners to Anticipate Upcoming Words: An Eye-Tracking Study
Mornati, Giulia; Riva, Valentina; Vismara, Elena; Molteni, Massimo; Cantiani, Chiara
Journal of Child Language, v50 n4 p841-859 Jul 2023
We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical Looking-While-Listening task. Children were presented with sentences and pictures of two objects representing nouns characterised by either the same gender (determiner was uninformative) or a different gender (determiner was informative). As expected, 20-month-old children recognised the target picture when this was named, and they were faster in the different-gender condition. Interestingly, 12-month-old infants identified the target picture only when presented with an informative determiner (different-gender condition). These results suggest that, as early as 12 months of age and with an improvement seen at 20 months of age, toddlers can extract and use determiner gender features to enhance comprehension and make predictions about upcoming words.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Italy
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A