Kerkhoff, A. , de Bree, E. & Wijnen, F.
Utrecht University
At 18 months infants are sensitive to distributional patterns in the input, such as the relationship between ?is? and ?ing? in ?is running? (Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998) and nonadjacent dependencies in an artificial ?aXb? language (Gómez, 2002). English ?frequent word frames? (e.g. you X it) were used by 12-month-olds for categorisation of novel nouns and verbs (Mintz, 2006), and Dutch ?frequent morpheme frames? (e.g. we X-en ?we X-plur?) were used by 16-month-olds (Kerkhoff et al., 2010). However, 19-month-old infants at family-risk (FR) of dyslexia (i.e. infants with a dyslexic parent) were not sensitive to a morphosyntactic dependency in Dutch (Wilsenach & Wijnen, 2004), and 18-month-old FR infants could not track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language (Kerkhoff et al., 2013). The current study investigates whether FR infants can use Dutch frequent morpheme frames for categorisation. Two groups of typically developing (TD) children aged 16 months (n=29) and 19 months (n=27) were compared to two groups of FR infants aged 16 months (n=35) and 19 months (n=21). In a headturn study, infants were exposed to sentences such as we freppen niet hoor ?we do not frep? in the training phase, and heard both a consistent sentence (wat frept er nou ?what freps now?) and an inconsistent one (ik zie een frepje ?I see a frep-dim?) in the test phase. Results showed that infants listened longer to sentences that were consistent with training (e.g. a novel ?noun? in a noun frame). There was also an interaction between Consistency, Group and Attention, indicating that for the TD group, only the infants who were ?attentive? during the test phase (i.e. those not showing restless behaviour) showed a familiarity preference, whereas this pattern of results was reversed for the FR children. This suggests that attentional factors may explain individual differences in children?s language learning skills.