Adults quickly adapt to the different statistics of a new linguistic environment: Structures that are used more often in a given situation come to be processed faster, which helps adults adjust their language processing to different dialects, registers, or speakers. This project asks whether syntactic prediction adaptation is also active in children's language processing, and whether it serves as a learning mechanism in language acquisition. I found that 3-6 years olds show rapid adaptation of predictions and use these in both language processing (comprehension of familiar sentences) and language acquisition (learning novel words and their grammatical category). Children younger than three were not found to show this ability.

Joint work of Dr. Naomi Havron, with collaborators: Anne Christophe (Ecole Normale Supérieure), Mireille Babineau (University of Toronto), Alex de Carvalho (Sorbonne).

Related Publications:

Havron, N., Scaff, C., Carbajal, M. J., Linzen, T., Barrault, A., & CHRISTOPHE, A. (2020, July 2). Priming syntactic ambiguity resolution in children and adults. View

Havron, N., de Carvalho, A., Fievet, A., & CHRISTOPHE, A. (2018, June 7). 3-4-year-old children rapidly adapt their predictions and use them to learn novel word meanings. View

Havron, N., Babineau, M., Fievet, A., de Carvalho, A., & CHRISTOPHE, A. (2021, May 30). Syntactic prediction adaptation accounts for language processing and language learning. View

Havron, N., Babineau, M., & CHRISTOPHE, A. (2020, June 17). 18-month-olds fail to use recent experience to infer the syntactic category of novel words. View

Beretti, M., Havron, N., & CHRISTOPHE, A. (2020, May 30). 4-5-year-old children adapt to the reliability of conflicting sources of information to learn novel words. View