Studying the Development of Predictive Language Comprehension Using a Naturalistic EEG Paradigm
Comprehension in adults is incremental, interactive and predictive. Not only do we interpret speech and text in light of top-down constraints, we also make predictions about upcoming lexical items before a word begins. For about 25 years, my lab has been exploring spoken language comprehension in 4- to 6-year-old children, who have considerable language experience but limited literacy. In our early work, we found that children's syntactic processing was both incremental and interactive, but curiously impervious to top-down information. Recent work in my lab uses EEG to study lexical processing using a naturalistic listening task (the Storytime Paradigm). Our findings demonstrate that young children use top-down constraints to make form-based lexical predictions. Predictive skill improves with age and with linguistic knowledge (as measured by vocabulary). This raises several questions. Why do syntactic and lexical processes show such different trajectories? How does prediction shape language learning and early literacy? When does lexical prediction first emerge?
Join us the for the talk and a light reception immediately following.
Charlene Mitchell
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