TY  - JOUR
A1  - Strotseva-Feinschmidt, Anna
A1  - Schipke, Christine S.
A1  - Gunter, Thomas C.
A1  - Brauer, Jens
A1  - Friederici, Angela D.
T1  - Young children’s sentence comprehension
T1  - Neural correlates of syntax-semantic competition
T2  - Brain and cognition : a journal of experimental and clinical research
N2  - Sentence comprehension requires the assignment of thematic relations between the verb and its noun arguments in order to determine who is doing what to whom. In some languages, such as English, word order is the primary syntactic cue. In other languages, such as German, case-marking is additionally used to assign thematic roles. During development children have to acquire the thematic relevance of these syntactic cues and weigh them against semantic cues. Here we investigated the processing of syntactic cues and semantic cues in 2- and 3-year-old children by analyzing their behavioral and neurophysiological responses. Case-marked subject-first and object-first sentences (syntactic cue) including animate and inanimate nouns (semantic cue) were presented auditorily. The semantic animacy cue either conflicted with or supported the thematic roles assigned by syntactic case-marking. In contrast to adults, for whom semantics did not interfere with case-marking, children attended to both syntactic and to semantic cues with a stronger reliance on semantic cues in early development. Children’s event-related brain potentials indicated sensitivity to syntactic information but increased processing costs when case-marking and animacy assigned conflicting thematic roles. These results demonstrate an early developmental sensitivity and ongoing shift towards the use of syntactic cues during sentence comprehension.
Y1  - 2018
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48743
SN  - 0278-2626
SN  - 1090-2147
VL  - 134
SP  - 110
EP  - 121
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  -