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Why do children pay more attention to grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2017

Megha SUNDARA
Megha SUNDARA*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles
*
Address for correspondence: Megha Sundara, Department of Linguistics, University of California at Los Angeles, 3125 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543. e-mail: megha.sundara@humnet.ucla.edu
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Abstract

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for the salience of grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences. We measured 22-month-olds’ listening times to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with third person singular -s. Crucially, by cross-splicing the speech stimuli, acoustic enhancement and sensory and recall advantages were fully crossed. Only children presented with the verb in sentence-final position, a position with sensory and recall advantages, distinguished between the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Thus, sensory and recall advantages alone were necessary and sufficient to make grammatical morphemes at ends of sentences salient. These general processing constraints privilege ends of sentences over middles, regardless of the acoustic enhancement.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , May 2018 , pp. 703 - 716
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

This research was funded by UCLA internal grants. I would like to thank Adrienne Scutellaro and Kristi Hendrickson for recruiting and testing subjects, and Katherine Demuth for discussions about the experiment.

References

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