Getting there faster: 18- and 24-month-old infants' use of function words to determine reference |
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| Authors: | Kedar Yarden Casasola Marianella Lust Barbara |
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| Institution: | Department of Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. yek2@cornell.edu |
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| 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. |
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