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

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 previouslyencountered 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.keywords: syntactic priming, lexical boost, working memory, productive syntactic skills, specific language impairment CHILDREN'S SYNTACTIC PRIMING MAGNITUDE 4 4

Encouraging Use of Subordination in Children’s Narratives: A Classroom-Based Priming Study

“…Marinellie (2006) found that children aged seven to eight years with specific language impairment (SLI) could be primed for adverbial subordinate clauses but not relative clauses, even though the latter were occasionally used spontaneously. In contrast, Foltz, Thiele, Kahsnitz, and Stenneken (2015) and Garraffa, Coco, and Branigan (2015) both demonstrated priming of subject relative clauses in children with SLI, aged four and five years (German and Italian -speaking respectively), although in the latter study they made less cumulative gain from repeated exposure than typically developing peers. As Kidd (2102) points out, participants' existing command of the target structure, and their linguistic capacity may both be important factors in priming success.…”

The lexical boost effect is not diagnostic of lexically-specific syntactic representations

“…To give an example, there has been a long-standing debate in the language development literature as to whether structural representations acquired early in life are lexically-specific or indeed more abstract. Some of the arguments surrounding this question have been based on the presence or absence of (predominantly verb-related) lexical boost effects on structural priming in children of various age groups (for recent discussions see, e.g., Branigan & McLean, 2016;Foltz, Thiele, Kahsnitz, & Stenneken, 2015;Morris & Scheepers, 2015;Peter, Chang, Pine, Blything, & Rowland, 2015;Rowland, Chang, Ambridge, Pine, & Lieven, 2012). Inasmuch as they rely on the premise that lexical boost effects are indicative of lexicalized syntactic frames, such arguments become less compelling when the present findings are considered.…”

Aging and syntactic representations: Evidence of preserved syntactic priming and lexical boost.

“…However, our finding of preserved lexical boost is not predicted by this model which proposes that lexical boost relies on the formation of explicit memory traces between the prime and target. However, the prediction that older adults should display a similar dissociation between syntactic priming and lexical boost to that which has been observed in young children (Foltz et al, 2015;Rowland et al, 2012) may be an oversimplification of the dynamic changes that occur across the lifespan. Aging is not simply 'development in reverse' and, although age-related brain changes do result in a regression in some cognitive functions, older adults can compensate for these changes by recruiting new brain areas and neural circuits (Craik & Bialystok, 2006).…”