The development of Japanese passive syntax as indexed by structural priming in comprehension

Abstract

A number of previous studies reported a phenomenon of syntactic priming with young children as evidence for cognitive representations required for processing syntactic structures. However, it remains unclear how syntactic priming reflects children's grammatical competence. The current study investigated structural priming of the Japanese passive structure with 5- and 6-year-old children in a visual-world setting. Our results showed a priming effect as anticipatory eye movements to an upcoming referent in these children but the effect was significantly stronger in magnitude in 6-year-olds than in 5-year-olds. Consistently, the responses to comprehension questions revealed that 6-year-olds produced a greater number of correct answers and more answers using the passive structure than 5-year-olds. We also tested adult participants who showed even stronger priming than the children. The results together revealed that language users with the greater linguistic competence with the passives exhibited stronger priming, demonstrating a tight relationship between the effect of priming and the development of grammatical competence. Furthermore, we found that the magnitude of the priming effect decreased over time. We interpret these results in the light of an error-based learning account. Our results also provided evidence for prehead as well as head-independent priming.

Keywords:

• Syntactic priming
• Language comprehension
• Syntactic development
• Anticipatory eye movements
• Head-final language

Manabu Arai is currently a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and acknowledges its support. The authors thank Katherine Messenger and Franklin Chang for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Chie Nakamura and Deng Ying for help in preparation of the manuscript.

Notes

¹ We also conducted an analysis on the gazes within the 800-ms time window from 200 ms to 1,000 ms following the adverb onset. The analysis showed essentially the same results, showing a significant main effect of prime type (β = –0.20, t = –5.08, p < .001) as well as an interaction between prime type and age group (β = –0.09, t = –2.39, p < .05). This supports that children made a structural prediction and launched anticipatory eye movements on hearing the adverb. Furthermore, we also analysed the gazes within the 600-ms time interval from 200 ms to 800 ms following the onset of the nominative case-marker. The result did not show either an effect of prime type (t = 0.01, p = .99) or an interaction between prime type and age (t = 0.85, p = .39), which confirms the absence of a priming effect before encountering the adverb.

² There is an ongoing discussion regarding the inclusion of random slopes in LME modelling. In particular, between-participants variance is predicted to be larger in children's data than in adults’ data. To check this, we tested a model that added prime type as a random slope for participants while keeping all other fixed and random factors including the interactions the same. The output from this model showed that the effect of prime type and the interaction between prime type and age group were attenuated considerably (β = –0.17, t = 1.75, and β = –0.06, t = 0.66, respectively, and p-values computed using a likelihood-ratio, LR, test were, respectively, p = .08 and p = .51), indicating that there was a nontrivial amount of variance across participants and items for the effect of prime type as well as for the interaction between prime type and age group. This is possibly because individual children differed greatly in the timing when they launched anticipatory eye movements. Thus, in order to make sure that the priming effect is reliable beyond sample population and specific experimental items, we conducted another analysis, in which all the fixations within the 800–1,600-ms time interval following the onset of the nominative case-marker were aggregated, and the log-ratio between the looks to the agent entity and those to the patient entity was calculated, with a LME model that included prime type as a single fixed factor and participants and items as random factors with a maximum random slope structure (i.e., prime type included as a random slope for both participants and items). The results showed a significant effect of prime type (β = –0.25, t = –2.14, p < .05), providing evidence for the effect of priming in 5- and 6-year-old children.

³ It is important to point out that none of the significant contributions of predictors with adults reported in Table 4 diminished below the significance level by including a random slope of prime type for participants (main effect of prime type, β = –0.38, t = 3.51; interaction between prime type and time, β = –0.19, t = –3.93).

⁴ Although our results demonstrated evidence for head-independent priming, they do not necessarily suggest that the effect is entirely lexically independent. The prime and target sentences in our study did not share any content words but did share the nominative case-marker ga for the sentence-initial NP. It is left to future research to examine whether the repetition of the case-marker was crucial for the priming effect observed in the current study.