J Child Lang. 2023 Jul 4:1-11. doi: 10.1017/S0305000923000387. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children’s real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames (Look at the… vs. Examine the…), followed by nouns that were higher- or lower-frequency labels for a referent (horse vs. pony). Toddlers showed no significant differences in comprehension of nouns in typical and atypical sentence frames. However, they were less accurate in recognizing lower-frequency nouns, particularly among toddlers with smaller vocabularies. We conclude that toddlers can recognize nouns in diverse sentence contexts, but their representations develop gradually.
PMID:37401467 | DOI:10.1017/S0305000923000387
