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Children's syntactic-priming magnitude: lexical factors and participant characteristics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2014

ANOUSCHKA FOLTZ ,
KRISTINA THIELE ,
DUNJA KAHSNITZ  and
PRISCA STENNEKEN
ANOUSCHKA FOLTZ*
Affiliation:
Bielefeld University
KRISTINA THIELE
Affiliation:
University of Cologne
DUNJA KAHSNITZ
Affiliation:
Bielefeld University
PRISCA STENNEKEN
Affiliation:
University of Cologne
*
Address for correspondence: Anouschka Foltz, CITEC Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology, Emergentist Semantics Group, PO Box 10 01 31, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany. tel.: + 49 (0) 521 106 12125; fax: + 49 (0) 521 106 15 12239; e-mail: anouschka.foltz@uni-bielefeld.de
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Abstract

This study examines whether lexical repetition, syntactic skills, and working memory (WM) affect children's syntactic-priming behavior, i.e. their tendency to adopt previously encountered syntactic structures. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children were primed with prenominal (e.g. the yellow cup) or relative clause (RC; e.g. the cup that is yellow) structures with or without lexical overlap and performed additional tests of productive syntactic skills and WM capacity. Results revealed a reliable syntactic-priming effect without lexical boost in both groups: SLI and TD children produced more RCs following RC primes than following prenominal primes. Grammaticality requirements influenced RC productions in that SLI children produced fewer grammatical RCs than TD children. Of the additional measures, WM positively affected how frequently children produced dispreferred RC structures, but productive syntactic skills had no effect. The results support an implicit-learning account of syntactic priming and emphasize the importance of WM in syntactic priming tasks.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , July 2015 , pp. 932 - 945
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

Anouschka Foltz, CRC 673 Alignment in Communication, Bielefeld University, CITEC Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University, and Clinical Linguistics, Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University; Kristina Thiele, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation, University of Cologne, CRC 673 Alignment in Communication, Bielefeld University, and CITEC Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University; Dunja Kahsnitz, Clinical Linguistics, Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University, and CRC 673 Alignment in Communication, Bielefeld University; Prisca Stenneken, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation, University of Cologne, CRC 673 Alignment in Communication, Bielefeld University, and CITEC Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University. Parts of this research have been presented at the 17th Meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, San Sebastian, Spain, and at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the German Association of Academic Speech and Language Therapists, Munich, Germany. We would like to thank the children and their families for their participation. In addition, we would like to thank Kathryn Bock and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

References

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