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Developmental Timescale of Rapid Adaptation to Conflicting Cues in Real‐Time Sentence Processing
Author(s) -
Yazbec Angele,
Kaschak Michael P.,
Borovsky Arielle
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.12704
Subject(s) - comprehension , sentence , task (project management) , cognitive psychology , sentence processing , adaptation (eye) , psychology , event (particle physics) , computer science , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , physics , management , quantum mechanics , economics , programming language
Abstract Children and adults use established global knowledge to generate real‐time linguistic predictions, but less is known about how listeners generate predictions in circumstances that semantically conflict with long‐standing event knowledge. We explore these issues in adults and 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children using an eye‐tracked sentence comprehension task that tests real‐time activation of unexpected events that had been previously encountered in brief stories. Adults generated predictions for these previously unexpected events based on these discourse cues alone, whereas children overall did not override their established global knowledge to generate expectations for semantically conflicting material; however, they do show an increased ability to integrate discourse cues to generate appropriate predictions for sentential endings. These results indicate that the ability to rapidly integrate and deploy semantically conflicting knowledge has a long developmental trajectory, with adult‐like patterns not emerging until later in childhood.