We will also stream this seminar via Zoom.
For the link, please contact us: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu

Jesse Snedeker
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Bottom-up syntax and top-down lexical processing in children: a theoretical challenge

Twenty-five years ago, I started working with John Trueswell on how children resolve syntactic ambiguity. The findings were cumulative, clear and theoretically consistent. By 5, children incrementally construct syntactic representations drawing on multiple bottom-up information sources to resolve ambiguity. But they are surprisingly poor at using top-down information. I thought that this might be a general property of child cognition, potentially linked to slower processing speeds.

More recently, folks in my lab have been studying lexical processes using production, naturalistic ERP studies, and the visual world paradigm. The findings here are quite different. By 5, children use top-down constraints to predict upcoming words, down the level of word form. Why are syntactic and lexical processing so different? I don’t know, but I have some hypotheses we can discuss.

A pizza lunch will be served. Please bring your own beverage.

Trainees are invited to join the speaker, along with our ILST speaker Roman Feiman, for brunch at 10:30am before the seminar. To sign up, please email: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu.