title: Predicting visual information during sentence processing: Toddlers activate an object's shape before it is mentioned.
abstract: We examined the contents of language-mediated prediction in toddlers by investigating the extent to which toddlers are sensitive to visual shape representations of upcoming words. Previous studies with adults suggest limits to the degree to which information about the visual form of a referent is predicted during language comprehension in low constraint sentences. Toddlers (30-month-olds) heard either contextually constraining sentences or contextually neutral sentences as they viewed images that were either identical or shape-related to the heard target label. We observed that toddlers activate shape information of upcoming linguistic input in contextually constraining semantic contexts; hearing a sentence context that was predictive of the target word activated perceptual information that subsequently influenced visual attention toward shape-related targets. Our findings suggest that visual shape is central to predictive language processing in toddlers.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Gordon College, Wenham, MA 01984, USA. Electronic address: susan.bobb@gordon.edu.
authors.forename: Susan C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Bobb
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6525 EZ Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Falk
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Huettig
authors.affiliation: "Psychology of Language" Research Group, University of Göttingen, D-37073 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Nivedita
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mani
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014796:Visual Perception; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Eye movements; Intermodal preferential looking; Prediction; Priming; Shape; Spoken word recognition