What children learn from adults’ utterances: an ephemeral lexical boost and persistent syntactic priming in adult–child dialogue

We show that children’s syntactic production is immediately affected by individual experiences of structures and verb–structure pairings within a dialogue, but that these effects have different timecourses. In a picture-matching game, three- to four-year-olds were more likely to describe a transitive action using a passive immediately after hearing the experimenter produce a passive than an active (abstract priming), and this tendency was stronger when the verb was repeated (lexical boost). The lexical boost disappeared after two intervening utterances, but the abstract priming effect persisted. This pattern did not differ significantly from control adults. Children also showed a cumulative priming effect. Our results suggest that whereas the same mechanism may underlie children’s immediate syntactic priming and long-term syntactic learning, different mechanisms underlie the lexical boost versus long-term learning of verb–structure links. They also suggest broad continuity of syntactic processing in production between this age group and adults.

Do you what I say? people reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances

We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by ‘correcting’ syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants’ syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances – even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.