[Koglist] [CEU Cogsci Talks] Christos Makrodimitris and Petra Schulz, Goethe University Frankfurt, Jan 11 9:30 AM: Temporal connectives in child language

Dear All, The Language Comprehension Lab cordially invites you to the following talk by: Christos Makrodimitris and Petra Schulz, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Date: Thursday, Jan 11, 2024 Time: 9:30 AM Venue: Language Comprehension Lab (D513) and Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/93265095380?pwd=VmZtSWFmL01OQ2ZlWDZ0NFhRSTFNdz09 Meeting ID: 932 6509 5380 Passcode: 181164 The speakers will join online. Title: "Temporal connectives in child language" Abstract: The sequence of sentences frequently reflects the order of events encoded by the clauses, resulting in iconicity (Diessel 2008), which may be overtly marked by lexical cues (e.g., after in (1a), before in (1b)). We can sidestep iconicity, however, by using temporal connectives non-iconically ((1b) for after, (1a) for before). (1) a. After/before he ate an apple, he read a letter. b. He read a letter, after/before he ate an apple. Extending previous research on children’s comprehension of sentences with before and after (e.g., Clark 1971, de Ruiter et al. 2018), we tested 60 monolingual Greek-speaking children (aged 6–11) with a sentence-picture matching task manipulating Iconicity (iconic/non-iconic) and Conjunction (before/after), see (1). A GLMM with Iconicity and Conjunction as fixed effects revealed a main effect of Iconicity and an interaction of Iconicity*Conjunction. Tukey-adjusted pairwise comparisons showed differences between iconic and non-noniconic after (p=0.002) and between noniconic before and noniconic after (p<0.001). This pattern suggests that violation of iconicity negatively affected comprehension of after but not of before. We propose that this asymmetry regarding iconicity can be accounted for by an event-semantic kindergarten-path effect: in languages with clause-initial connectives like English or Greek, non-iconic after-sentences (1b) are more difficult than their iconic variant (1a), because the sentence-medial connective forces the listener to integrate a subordinate event into the—already processed—main clause event and to revise the initial event order. Non-iconic before-sentences (1a) are not harder than their iconic variant, because sentence-initial before serves as an early cue of the non-iconic order, so reanalysis of the event-representation is either not needed or happens early on. The event-semantic kindergarten-path effect predicts that children should master non-iconic before earlier than non-iconic after. This was borne out in our results; 23 children had mastered non-iconic before but not non-iconic after, whereas no child had mastered non-iconic after but not non-iconic before. Notably, monolingual German-speaking children and Greek-German bilingual children, who were tested with the same experimental design, showed the same interpretation pattern, with non-iconic after being most difficult. If our proposal applies to comprehension more generally, adults are expected to show an event-semantic kindergarten-path under the right conditions in reading. References: • Clark, E. V. (1971). On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after. J. of Verbal Learng. a. Verbal Beh., 10, 266–275. • De Ruiter, L. E., Theakston, A. L., Brandt, S., & Lieven, E. V. M. (2018). Iconicity affects children's comprehension of complex sentences: The role of semantics, clause order, input and individual differences. Cognition. 171, 202–224. • Diessel, H. (2008). Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-based analysis of the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics, 19(3), 465–490. Kind regards, Attila ______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu