Children’s language comprehension: incremental, interactive and abstract
Dr. Jesse Snedeker, Harvard University
Monday, March 17 at 5:30 p.m., 118 Psychology
In the last thirty years, cognitive science has converged on a model of human information processing with three characteristics: levels of representation, the incremental propagation of information from one level to the next, and interactivity (processes at one level are influenced by information at multiple other levels). My research uses the visual world paradigm and priming techniques to demonstrate that children’s moment-to-moment language comprehension has all three of these properties. These tools can be used to explore the nature of the representations that children construct during language processing, their ability to make pragmatic inferences, and how these processes break down in developmental disorders.
Suggested Readings
Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2011). Cascading activation across levels of representation in children’s lexical processing. Journal of Child Language. [.pdf]
Thothathiri, M. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Syntactic priming during language comprehension in three- and four-year old children. Journal of Memory and Language. [.pdf]