Preschoolers' Real-Time Eye Movements Reveal Sensitivity to Connective Meanings During Word Learning
Résumé
Although children produce connectives such as so and but by around age 3 [1,2], research investigating the comprehension of connectives has found that until age 7, children struggle to understand the contrastive meaning of but and even fail to distinguish the meanings of but and so [3–6]. However, previous comprehension studies have predominantly relied on explicit measures, such as pointing in picture selection tasks and metalinguistic judgments. It has therefore remained an open question how young children process sentences containing connectives in real time, and whether a more fine-grained measure, such as eye-tracking, could better reflect their processing and comprehension skills. To address this question, we examined both preschoolers’ eye movements and explicit pointing responses in a novel word learning task with discourse contexts containing either but or so.
In a preferential looking paradigm [Fig.1], 4- to 6-year-old French-speaking children (n=71) and a baseline adult group (n=24) listened to French sentences containing so or but and a novel word, such as “Anna a eu de la soupe au déjeuner, [alors/mais] elle a utilisé une bamoule” (“Anna had soup for lunch, [so/but] she used a bamoule”). At the same time, participants saw pairs of images on a computer screen: one semantically associated with the initial context (a spoon) and one that contrasted with the initial context (a fork). After the end of the sentence, they were asked to select the image that matched the novel word (e.g., “Can you show me a bamoule?”). Eye gaze and pointing were recorded. The results of the pointing task [Fig.2] replicate previous studies in English [6] and show that, unlike adults, preschoolers select the semantically associated image at above-chance rates in both the but (p<0.01; CI: [0.63,0.77]) and the so condition (p<0.01; CI: [0.83,0.91]). However, French children were clearly able to distinguish the meanings of mais (but) and alors (so), as they were more likely to choose the semantically associated image in the so condition than the but condition (β=0.16; p<0.01). Moreover, while hearing the sentences unfold, soon after the connective onset, children (like adults) looked significantly more to the semantically associated image in the so condition than in the but condition [Fig.3]. Thus, children as young as 4 show sensitivity to the difference between but and so during online processing, even if their final interpretations do not reflect a contrastive understanding of but.
This is the first study examining whether and how causal and contrastive connectives affect preschoolers’ language processing and word learning in real time. While previous studies based on offline measures suggested that children fail to understand the contrastive meaning of but and do not distinguish between the meanings of but and so, our results indicate that children as young as 4 display some understanding of contrastive connectives during sentence processing. The question remains how children eventually overcome their difficulties with but; we are currently examining whether children’s struggles with but may be linked to immature cognitive control skills and will present these additional findings at the conference.
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