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The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different types.

The institute is situated on the campus of the Radboud University. We participate in the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, and have particularly close ties to that institute's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. We also participate in the Centre for Language Studies. A joint graduate school, the IMPRS in Language Sciences, links the Donders Institute, the CLS and the MPI.

 

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Young children can predict upcoming words

Two-year-olds, especially children with large production vocabularies, are able to predict upcoming words in a sentence, Falk Huettig (MPI and RU) and Nivedita Mani (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) recently discovered. Their study 'Prediction during language processing is a piece of cake - But only for skilled producers' was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

Young children can predict upcoming words

August 15, 2012

When two-year-olds hear a sentence like, “The boy eats a big cake,” they fixate on edible objects in a visual scene (a cake) soon after they hear the (semantically constraining) verb eats and prior to hearing the word cake. Moreover, children's prediction ability depends on their production skills and not to their comprehension skills. "Prediction is a piece of cake, but only for skilled producers," the authors conclude in their paper.

Piece of cake

In the study, each child was presented with 12 test trials. Prior to the test trials, children were shown a cartoon of a boy and a girl, and were told that they were going to hear some stories about them. Each test trial then began with the presentation of two images of familiar objects side-by-side on the screen, followed by a sentence containing either a semantically constraining or semantically neutral verb related to one of the images on the screen. For instance, children saw a picture of a cake (Kuchen) and a bird (Vogel), and heard either a sentence containing a semantically constraining verb (“The boy eats the big cake”) or a sentence containing a neutral verb (“The boy sees the big cake”).
 

Figure 1 Huettig 

The researchers found that children fixate on the target image (e.g., cake, Kuchen) earlier while listening to sentences containing semantically constraining verbs (eats, isst) compared to neutral verbs (sees, sieht). Their findings confirm that 2-year-olds, like adults, are successfully able to predict upcoming linguistic input that is a thematic fit to familiar verbs.

Prediction tied to production

"We suggest that the developing production system learns to implicitly predict linguistic input that fits incoming speech input," says Falk Huettig. "Our language production system seems to be intrinsically involved in the mechanisms underlying prediction in language comprehension," he concludes. "There is a component to children’s prediction ability that is specifically tied to children’s production skills and not to their comprehension skills." 
 
Link to the publication.
 
 
Last checked 2012-09-27 by Myrna Tinbergen

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