Local and topological processing in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis cross-linguistic study investigates the relative importance of validity in terms of the strengths of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children (4; 6–6; 6). The notion of cue cost refers to the distinction between local and topological processing types. Choices of the agent (cue strength) and latencies (cue cost) were collected through the acting out of sentences containing different syntactic cues. These cues (word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement plus accusative preposition a in Spanish) are ordered on a continuum from the most topological (word order) to the most local (preposition a). The analysis of cue strengths reveals that, while for French children a linguistic cue is all the stronger the more topological it is (verbal agreement < clitic pronoun < word order), for Spanish children a cue is all the stronger the more local it is (word order < clitic pronoun < verbal agreement < preposition a). The fact that Spanish children's latencies are always shorter (2150 msec) than those of French children (3110 msec) must be related to the effect of the preposition a which permits efficient role assignments with minimal cost. These results stress the importance of locality in sentence processing. On the other hand, a comparison with our similar adult cross-linguistic data demonstrates that the impact of cue cost changes over time.