Title: "Children's Use of Top-Down Processing during Language Comprehension"
Speaker: Krista Voelmle, HESP Honors Program
Date: Monday, April 7; 10-11 AM
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Abstract:
It is known that adults use top-down processing and their previous knowledge to predict words especially at phonetic boundaries (Rayner, Slattery, Drieghe, & Liversedge, 2011). We can use this kind of situation to investigate the age at which children begin to use this type of top-down processing to interpret words in similar situations. For my honors thesis I have been investigating how and at what age do children's knowledge of words influence their perception of sounds in the language. Specifically, I am looking at 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds to investigate if at this age these children have the ability to use top-down processing to predict word-endings. I am using an ASL eye-tracking paradigm with E-prime stimulus-presentation software to collect my data. The participants are presented with 10 words that come from two continuums: kiss-kish and fish-fiss. The words that are presented include "fish", "fiss", "kiss", "kish" and three ambiguous words from the middle of each continuum that could be heard as having either an /s/ ending or an /sh/ ending. We are looking at anticipatory eye-movement to see if the participant can predict the end of the ambiguous word using preexisting knowledge of the real words "fish" and "kiss".
