Havron, N. , de Carvalho, A. , Fiévet , A. & Christophe, A.
École normale supérieure, ENS, EHESS, PSL Research University, LSCP, Département d?études cognitives, Paris, FR.
Prediction has been put forward as a mechanism that can capture key aspects of language acquisition. Under this proposal, children master linguistic structures by predicting speakers' utterances, and adjusting their predictions based on novel information. This account predicts that children would rely on their adapted expectations to learn new information (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006). There is currently little direct evidence that children generate expectations rapidly enough to allow learning through prediction (Rabagliati, Gambi, & Pickering, 2015). The current study aims to fill this gap. We examine whether children's recent processing of familiar sentences causes them to adjust their predictions in a way that influences their learning of novel words.
We tested 3-4-year-old children (n=45), and used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate their expectations. In French, la petite can either be followed by a noun (e.g., la petite grenouille, "the little frog") or by a verb (la petite dort, "the little one is sleeping"). Depending on the condition, children were led to expect either a noun or a verb in this context. At test, children saw two videos - one showing a girl performing a novel action, and the other showing a novel object - while listening to la petite followed by a novel word (that could be interpreted as either a verb or a noun). Their looking time towards each one for the videos was measured. Children for whom la petite predicted verbs looked longer at the action video than children for whom it predicted nouns, suggesting that they were more likely to interpret the novel word as referring to an action (beta=.189, SE=.06, p=.003, d=0.941). Results suggest that children make rapid changes to their predictions, and use this information to learn, supporting the role of prediction in language acquisition.