Lively Looks: Priming Preschoolers’ Predictions of Post-verbal Arguments during Online Sentence Processing

This study explores the grammatical representations employed by preschoolers during online sentence processing. Tomasello and colleagues have argued that young children, unlike adults, are limited to structural representations organized around individual lexical items (Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000) 156). Evidence for broader syntactic representations in adults comes from, among other things, studies showing syntactic priming during production, which persists in the absence of lexical overlap. Studies of production priming in children have produced mixed results. The present study uses the visual-world paradigm to look for comprehension-to-comprehension priming in 4-year-old children. In two experiments, we find structural priming for datives which persists even when the prime and target sentences do not share any content words. These results demonstrate that four-year-olds have abstract structural representations that are not solely based on individual lexical items, and that they use those representations to anticipate the arguments of verbs during online sentence processing.