title: Dutch and English toddlers' use of linguistic cues in predicting upcoming turn transitions.
abstract: Adults achieve successful coordination during conversation by using prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to predict upcoming changes in speakership. We examined the relative weight of these linguistic cues in the prediction of upcoming turn structure by toddlers learning Dutch (Experiment 1; N = 21) and British English (Experiment 2; N = 20) and adult control participants (Dutch: N = 16; English: N = 20). We tracked participants' anticipatory eye movements as they watched videos of dyadic puppet conversation. We controlled the prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to turn completion for a subset of the utterances in each conversation to create four types of target utterances (fully incomplete, incomplete syntax, incomplete prosody, and fully complete). All participants (Dutch and English toddlers and adults) used both prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to anticipate upcoming speaker changes, but weighed lexicosyntactic cues over prosodic ones when the two were pitted against each other. The results suggest that Dutch and English toddlers are already nearly adult-like in their use of prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues in anticipating upcoming turn transitions.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Imme
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Lammertink
authors.affiliation: Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Marisa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Casillas
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Newcastle University Newcastle, NSW, Australia.
authors.forename: Titia
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Benders
authors.affiliation: Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Cambridge University Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Brechtje
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Post
authors.affiliation: Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Paula
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fikkert
keywords: child language; eye-tracking; lexicosyntax; prosody; turn prediction