ArticlePloS one2017
Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences?: A permutation analysis.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The Agent Preference in Ontogeny: Predictability of Agent and Patient Roles in Child-Directed Utterances Across Languages.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- American Sign Language basic clause comprehension strategies used by late first-language learners: Plausibility, animacy, and linguistic structure.Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development · 2025Article
- The role of executive function in the processing and acquisition of syntax.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The Feasibility of Remote Visual-World Eye-Tracking With Young Children.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Learning verbs in English and Korean: The roles of word order and argument drop.Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development · 2024Article
- Agents Strongly Preferred: ERP Evidence from Natives and Non-Natives Processing Intransitive Sentences in Spanish.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Children's syntactic parsing and sentence comprehension with a degraded auditory signal.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2022Article
- Parental tuning of language input to autistic and nonspectrum children.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Mistakes weren't made: Three-year-olds' comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax.Cognition · 2018Article
- Selective Attention in Early Word Learning: An Eye-Tracking Study on Viewing Naturalistic Egocentric Scenes.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
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5 authors.
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Abstract
We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active from passive sentences, after processing the remainder of the sentence frame. For this second question we used eye-tracking (Study 1) and forced-choice pointing (Study 2). For both studies, we used a paradigm in which participants simultaneously saw two novel actions with reversed agent-patient relations while listening to active and passive sentences. We compared English-speaking 25-month-olds and 41-month-olds in between-subjects sentence structure conditions (Active Transitive Condition vs. Passive Condition). A permutation analysis found that both age groups showed a bias to incrementally map the first noun in a sentence onto an agent role. Regarding the second question, 25-month-olds showed some evidence of distinguishing the two structures in the eye-tracking study. However, the 25-month-olds did not distinguish active from passive sentences in the forced choice pointing task. In contrast, the 41-month-old children did reanalyse their initial first-NP-as-agent bias to the extent that they clearly distinguished between active and passive sentences both in the eye-tracking data and in the pointing task. The results are discussed in relation to the development of syntactic (re)parsing.
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