On-line sentence processing in Swedish: cross-linguistic developmental comparisons with French

Abstract

This study examined on-line processing of Swedish sentences in a grammaticality-judgement experiment within the framework of the Competition Model. Three age groups from 6 to 11 and an adult group were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors concerning cue cost were studied: violation position (early vs. late), violation span (intraphrasal vs. interphrasal) and violation type (agreement vs. word order). Developmental results showed that children were always slower at detecting grammatical violations. Irrespective of age, participants were faster at judging sentences with late violations, especially in the younger groups. Intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones, particularly in adults. Finally, agreement violations and word order ones did not differ. The hierarchy of cue cost factors indicated that violation span was the dominant one. A cross-linguistic analysis with French (Kail, 2004) underlines the developmental processing abilities and the interdependence between cue cost and cue validity.

Effects of frequency and morphosyntactic structure on error detection, correction, and repetition in Swedish-speaking children

“…Researchers who view the error detection/grammatical judgment task as primarily capturing explicit metalinguistic skills have not considered potential effects of token frequency, as the assumption is that detecting an error involves conscious reflection on the target morphosyntactic rule (see, e.g., Montgomery & Leonard, 1998; Noonan et al, 2014; Rice et al, 1999). Several studies that have used the error detection task to measure implicit language processing have only emphasized effects of type frequency and not token frequency, acknowledging that the detection of errors that violate high-frequency morphosyntactic patterns should be faster and more accurate than errors violating a more infrequent pattern (e.g., Blackwell, Bates, & Fisher, 1996; Kail, Kihlstedt, & Bonnet, 2012). Many speeded error detection studies within this framework do not discuss the possible effects of token frequency, however, even when low-frequency words are included in the materials (see, e.g., Kail et al, 2012).…”

“…Several studies that have used the error detection task to measure implicit language processing have only emphasized effects of type frequency and not token frequency, acknowledging that the detection of errors that violate high-frequency morphosyntactic patterns should be faster and more accurate than errors violating a more infrequent pattern (e.g., Blackwell, Bates, & Fisher, 1996; Kail, Kihlstedt, & Bonnet, 2012). Many speeded error detection studies within this framework do not discuss the possible effects of token frequency, however, even when low-frequency words are included in the materials (see, e.g., Kail et al, 2012). In terms of error detection accuracy, several studies have found that school-age children perform close to ceiling across different types of errors, which could be due to the error type choices, or reflect that the tasks were primarily designed to capture difficulties in children with DLD (Miller et al, 2008; Montgomery & Leonard, 1998; Purdy, Leonard, Weber-Fox, & Kaganovich, 2014; Wulfeck, Bates, Krupa-Wiatkowski, & Saltzman, 2004).…”