Two-year-olds compute syntactic structure on-line.
Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences. We observed an early left-lateralized brain response when an expected verb was incorrectly replaced by a noun (or vice versa). Thus, toddlers build on-line expectations as to the syntactic category of the next word in a sentence. In addition, the response topography was different for nouns and verbs, suggesting that different neural networks already underlie noun and verb processing in toddlers, as they do in adults.
Bernal
Savita
S
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS/CNRS/DEC-ENS, Paris, France.
Dehaene-Lambertz
Ghislaine
G
Millotte
Séverine
S
Christophe
Anne
A
D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009862:Online Systems; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics