Piece of Cake

Nivedita Mani and Falk Huettig conducted this experiment to determine whether or not there are individual differences in children’s prediction of upcoming linguistic input. What I think this is saying is that they wanted to figure out, when focusing solely on children (toddlers), if the toddlers comprehension skills were in any way correlated to their prediction abilities. In their experiment the participants were 30 German toddlers (23.1-25.43 months old). To conduct the experiment each one of the toddlers sat on their caregivers lap facing 2 different screens with cameras mounted on top to detect where and when the toddler’s eyes move to one of the two screens displaying familiar pictures. First the toddlers would see the 2 pictures, then hear a sentence (spoken by a native German speaking woman), containing either a semantically constraining verb or a neutral verb, then the camera detects which picture the toddler looks at and at exactly what millisecond he or she looks at it. The example the use to explain the difference between each verb is: “The boy eats the big cake” (semantically constraining) and “The boy sees the big cake” (neutral). They found that shortly after the onset of the verb, toddlers fixate on the target (correct) image more in semantically constraining trials than with neutral trials. They also found that there was no significant correlation between children’s comprehension vocabulary size and their prediction abilities. Ultimately their findings confirm that 2-year-olds are indeed able to predict upcoming linguistic input (i.e. cake) that is a thematic fir to familiar verbs (i.e. eat). Toddlers were more likely to anticipate semantically appropriate verb arguments (after hearing eat, they would associate edible objects rather than unrelated distractor objects.