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Effects of semantic plausibility, syntactic complexity and n-gram frequency on children's sentence repetition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

Kamila POLIŠENSKÁ ,
Shula CHIAT ,
Jakub SZEWCZYK  and
Katherine E. TWOMEY
Kamila POLIŠENSKÁ*
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester, UK
Shula CHIAT
Affiliation:
City, University of London, UK
Jakub SZEWCZYK
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Katherine E. TWOMEY
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester, UK
*
*Corresponding author: Kamila Polišenská Division of Human Communication, Development and Hearing, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom Phone: +44 0161 275 3369 Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three factors in a sentence repetition task performed by children aged 4–7 and 11–12 years. It was found that semantic plausibility benefitted performance in both age groups; syntactic complexity disadvantaged the younger group but benefitted the older group; while contrary to previous findings, n-gram frequency did not facilitate, and in a post-hoc analysis even hampered, performance. This new evidence suggests that n-gram frequency effects might be restricted to the highly constrained and frequent n-grams used in previous investigations, and that semantics and morphosyntax play a more powerful role than n-gram frequency, supporting the role of abstract linguistic knowledge in children's sentence processing.

Keywords

sentence repetitionn-gramssemanticssyntax
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , March 2021 , pp. 261 - 284
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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