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Getting There Faster: 18‐ and 24‐Month‐Old Infants' Use of Function Words to Determine Reference
Author(s) -
Kedar Yarden,
Casasola Marianella,
Lust Barbara
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00873.x
Subject(s) - psychology , sentence , nonsense , task (project management) , noun phrase , noun , word (group theory) , determiner , function (biology) , linguistics , cognitive psychology , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , management , evolutionary biology , biology , economics , gene
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.