LSLT: Kathleen Oppenheimer

Although we will continue to offer a Zoom option for LSLT for now, we strongly encourage you to attend in person! The talk is only part of the point of LSLT: it's a good opportunity to meet and chat with students and faculty in other departments. And we've now reinstated the classic LSLT sandwich line!

Zoom link: https://go.umd.edu/lslt-zoom

Language Knowledge Influences Parsing Strategies in 5-year-old Children

Abstract: Adult listeners hearing a sentence such as "cut the cupcake with the candle," initially predict VP-attachment of the prepositional phrase, but revise their prediction when they encounter the implausible instrument candle. 5-year-old typically developing children also predict VP-attachment, but revise their predictions less often than adults, resulting in more frequent implausible actions. Adults with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are less sensitive to verb bias than their peers with a history of typical language development, and pilot data suggests that 5-year-olds with DLD do not make predictions when listening to simple active transitive sentences. In this study, I investigate the role of language knowledge in parsing strategies used by 5-year-old children with a range of language abilities when they act out responses to globally ambiguous sentences.