Getting There Faster: 18‐ and 24‐Month‐Old Infants' Use of Function Words to Determine Reference
- 23 March 2006
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Child Development
- Vol. 77 (2), 325-338
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00873.x
Abstract
Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner the preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which the was either dropped, replaced by a nonsense function word (el), or replaced by an alternate English function word (and). Both the 18- and 24-month-old infants oriented faster and more accurately to a visual target following grammatical sentences. The results suggest that by 18 months of age, infants use their knowledge of determiners in sentence computation and in establishing reference.Keywords
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