Effects of Text Exposure on Spoken Sentence Production

Effects of Text Exposure on Spoken Sentence Production Jessica L. Montag (JLMONTAG@Indiana.Edu) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, 1101 E. 10th Street Bloomington, IN 47405 USA Maryellen C. MacDonald (MCMACDONALD@Wisc.Edu) Department of Psychology, 1202 W. Johnson Street Madison, WI 53706 USA Abstract Adults are sophisticated language users, and there is much debate as to the maturational and experiential changes that occur throughout childhood to bring about these abilities. We propose that the onset of literacy may be an important event in the course of language development, as it marks a qualitative shift in the linguistic patterns to which an individual is exposed. In Experiment 1, we investigate the frequencies of two complex sentence types in child-directed speech and literature. In Experiment 2, these sentence types are elicited from eight and twelve year old children and adults in a picture-description production task. Differences between written and spoken language predict both group differences and individual differences in text exposure on the production task. Linguistic experience gained from reading may affect spoken production choices, and the onset of literacy may be an important predictor for what in the laboratory is deemed adult-like language use. Keywords: Sentence production; relative clauses; corpus analysis; literacy. Introduction By adulthood, language users can rapidly access their knowledge of different patterns, at different grain sizes, when producing and comprehending language. This sophisticated language ability takes time to develop, and there is much debate as to the sorts of changes that occur across the developmental trajectory that eventually yield these language abilities. This is especially true of complex sentences, particularly those containing relative clauses, as these sentence types tend to have longer developmental trajectories and even in adults are thought to tax working memory or other language abilities (Gibson, 1998; Just & Carpenter, 1992; Miller & Chomsky, 1963). Indeed, many theories of language development suggest that children struggle with complex sentences because they tax working memory capacity (deVilliers et al., 1979) or reflect children’s limited syntactic competence (Goodluck & Tavakolian, 1982) More recent theories suggest that children’s limited linguistic experience may contribute to their difficulty with these complex sentences. Children’s use of relative clauses (Diessel & Tomasello, 2005) and other language constructions tend to track their linguistic input (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987; Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven & Tomasello, 2003; Huttenlocher et al., 2002; Naigles & Hoff- Ginsberg, 1998). Quantifying the types of experience that a child may have with a particular sentence type may be crucial for understanding children’s comprehension and production behavior. In order to quantify a child’s experience with a particular sentence type, it is important to consider experience from both the spoken, and when a child learns how to read, the written domain. This is particularly true of sentences containing object relative (1) and passive relative clauses (2a,b), which are known to have different distributions in written and spoken language in adult-directed sources (Reali & Christiansen, 2007; Roland, Dick & Elman, 2007). These systematically different linguistic patterns in written and spoken language suggests that learning to read might mark an important period of change in language development, in which there is a qualitative shift in the pattern of language statistics and individual encounters. The goal of the present study is to determine whether these sentence types also occur with different patterns in child-directed written and spoken language, and use differences in the patterns between these domains to make predictions about eight and twelve-year old children and adults’ production patterns in a picture-description production task. 1) Object Relative: The ball that the man is throwing 2a) Be-Passive Relative: The ball that is being thrown by the man 2b) Get-Passive Relative: The ball that is getting thrown by the man These sentence types are a particularly interesting arena to investigate effects of reading because previous research suggests that in adult-directed sources, object relative clauses (1) tend to be more frequent in spoken language while passive relatives (2a,b) tend to be more frequent in written language (Roland et al., 2007). If these patterns appear in child-directed sources as well, we would predict that older children, or children who are better readers, might produce more passive relatives than younger children or poorer readers. Previous work also suggests that in main clause utterances, get-passives (2b) are more frequent in spoken language than be-passives (2a), while opposite is true of written language (Biber et al., 1999; Collins, 1996). Again, we would predict that older children or better readers should produce more be-passives, consistent with their higher rates of exposure to patterns of written language. Experiment 1 consists of corpus analyses of child-directed speech (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 2000) and children’s