TY  - JOUR
A1  - Brandt-Kobele, Oda-Christina
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - The detection of subject-verb agreement violations by German-speaking children: An eye-tracking study
T2  - Lingua : international review of general linguistics
N2  - This study examines the processing of sentences with and without subject verb agreement violations in German-speaking children at three and five years of age. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure whether children's looking behavior was influenced by the grammaticality of the test sentences. The older group of children turned their gaze faster towards a target picture and looked longer at it when the object noun referring to the target was presented in a grammatical sentence with subject verb agreement compared to when the object noun was presented in a sentence in which an agreement violation occurred. The younger group of children displayed less conclusive results, with a tendency to look longer but not faster towards the target picture in the grammatical compared to the ungrammatical condition. This is the first experimental evidence that German-speaking five-year old children are sensitive to subject verb agreement and violations thereof. Our results additionally substantiate that the eye-tracking paradigm is suitable to examine children's sensitivity to subtle grammatical violations.
KW  - Subject-verb agreement
KW  - Eye-tracking
KW  - Language acquisition
KW  - German
Y1  - 2014
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/37903
SN  - 0024-3841
SN  - 1872-6135
VL  - 144
SP  - 7
EP  - 20
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -