The interplay of prominence-lending factors and language production in children

Abstract

Several factors influence how adult speakers produce an utterance and which element they choose to start with. For example, German-speaking adults are more likely to begin an utterance with an element if it is (a) in their focus of attention, (b) animate rather than inanimate, and (c) on the left side of a picture rather than the right. However, while such prominence-lending factors affect adult language production, little is known about their effect on child language production. The current study addresses this issue by testing German preschoolers in picture-based language production tasks while measuring gaze patterns via eye-tracking. Specifically, we examined the effect of three factors known to affect adult language production—attentional cueing, animacy, and position in a visual display. To assess how children respond to these manipulations, we zoomed in on two syntactic structures for which children demonstrate varying degrees of proficiency: conjoined noun phrases and transitive sentences. Our results revealed no effects of animacy and position, but significant effects of attention on child language production. Children were more likely to first fixate on a character that had been visually cued and were also more likely to name that character first when producing conjoined noun phrases. Furthermore, initial fixations predicted the order in which children mentioned elements, suggesting a tight link between visual attention and language production. However, visual attention exclusively affected the linearization of nouns in simple conjoined noun phrases but not the selection of starting points in children's production of transitive sentences. These findings show that children's tendency to verbalize what is in their focus of attention is influenced by syntactic complexity. Specifically, even when children's focus of attention was on the patient character, they nonetheless adhered to their preferred active SVO sentence structure. Furthermore, children's sentence planning strategies as reflected by speech-onset-times and the number of disfluencies were likewise immune to prominence-lending factors. Thus, unlike adults in comparable experiments, our findings seem to suggest that children did not show a radically linear incremental word-by-word sentence planning strategy that proceeds from the element in the focus of attention.