Speaker: Yi-ting Huang, UMD HESP
Date: October 29th, 12-1pm
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Title: "Exploring socioeconomic differences in syntactic development through processing"
Abstract:
Input differences across socioeconomic status (SES) have been shown to greatly impact vocabulary development, but their role in syntactic development is less understood. We investigated whether SES effects reflect the input needed to build syntactic representations or the processing demands associated with real-time comprehension. We compared interpretations of passive sentences in 5-year-olds from lower- and higher-SES families. Patterns of eye-movements revealed that children from higher-SES families rapidly distinguished passives from actives (“eaten by” vs. “eating”), but those from lower-SES families exhibited slower, average sensitivity. Critically, this delayed processing generated specific challenges for interpreting passives that required children to overcome a bias to initially construe the first noun as an agent (“The seal is quickly eaten by it”). In their subsequent actions, children from lower-SES families were more likely to incorrectly interpret the first noun as the predator rather than the prey. In contrast, when presented with passives that did not require syntactic revision (“It is quickly eaten by the seal”), children were equally proficient across SES. This suggests that input differences influence children’s real-time sensitivity to linguistic cues within utterances, impacting their ability to effectively recruit these cues to reanalyze initial misinterpretations.
