Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adults anticipate semantically related information when a disfluency is presented using the syntactic and semantic information of the sentence context (Lowder & Ferreira, 2016). Anticipation skills depend on experience and language development, whether children present similar anticipation skills is unknown. This research aimed to explore the anticipation skills based on disfluencies in school children (8-9 years old) and adults. Participants heard disfluency (In the yard, I saw a dog, no, a rabbit) and coordination (In the yard, I saw a dog and a rabbit) sentences and observed four pictures: the first noun (dog), the second noun (rabbit), a critical distractor (cat), and an unrelated distractor (tiger). Results demonstrated that children and adults looked more at the critical distractor than at the unrelated image only in disfluency condition; however, children were slower than adults in predicting the next noun. Therefore, our results revealed that language prediction becomes more efficient with development.