title: Morphological constraints in children's spoken language comprehension: a visual world study of plurals inside compounds in English.
abstract: Many previous studies have shown that the human language processor is capable of rapidly integrating information from different sources during reading or listening. Yet, little is known about how this ability develops from child to adulthood. To gain insight into how children (in comparison to adults) handle different kinds of linguistic information during on-line language comprehension, the current study investigates a well-known morphological phenomenon that is subject to both structural and semantic constraints, the plurals-in-compounds effect, i.e. the dislike of plural (specifically regular plural) modifiers inside compounds (e.g. rats eater). We examined 96 seven-to-twelve-year-old children and a control group of 32 adults measuring their eye-gaze changes in response to compound-internal plural and singular forms. Our results indicate that children rely more upon structural properties of language (in the present case, morphological cues) early in development and that the ability to efficiently integrate information from multiple sources takes time for children to reach adult-like levels.
authors.affiliation: Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK. Electronic address: renita.silva@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Renita
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Silva
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gerth
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Clahsen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Compounding; Developmental morphology; Eye movements; Morphological processing; Visual world paradigm