TY - JOUR
T1 - The detection of subject-verb agreement violations by German-speaking children
T2 - An eye-tracking study
AU - Brandt-Kobele, Oda Christina
AU - Höhle, Barbara
PY - 2014/5
Y1 - 2014/5
N2 - This study examines the processing of sentences with and without subject-verb agreement violations in German-speaking children at three and five years of age. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure whether children's looking behavior was influenced by the grammaticality of the test sentences. The older group of children turned their gaze faster towards a target picture and looked longer at it when the object noun referring to the target was presented in a grammatical sentence with subject-verb agreement compared to when the object noun was presented in a sentence in which an agreement violation occurred. The younger group of children displayed less conclusive results, with a tendency to look longer but not faster towards the target picture in the grammatical compared to the ungrammatical condition. This is the first experimental evidence that German-speaking five-year old children are sensitive to subject-verb agreement and violations thereof. Our results additionally substantiate that the eye-tracking paradigm is suitable to examine children's sensitivity to subtle grammatical violations.
AB - This study examines the processing of sentences with and without subject-verb agreement violations in German-speaking children at three and five years of age. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure whether children's looking behavior was influenced by the grammaticality of the test sentences. The older group of children turned their gaze faster towards a target picture and looked longer at it when the object noun referring to the target was presented in a grammatical sentence with subject-verb agreement compared to when the object noun was presented in a sentence in which an agreement violation occurred. The younger group of children displayed less conclusive results, with a tendency to look longer but not faster towards the target picture in the grammatical compared to the ungrammatical condition. This is the first experimental evidence that German-speaking five-year old children are sensitive to subject-verb agreement and violations thereof. Our results additionally substantiate that the eye-tracking paradigm is suitable to examine children's sensitivity to subtle grammatical violations.
KW - Eye-tracking
KW - German
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Subject-verb agreement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84899923932&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.lingua.2013.12.008
DO - 10.1016/j.lingua.2013.12.008
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84899923932
SN - 0024-3841
VL - 144
SP - 7
EP - 20
JO - Lingua
JF - Lingua
ER -