Developmental changes in how children generalize from their experience to support predictive linguistic processing

Abstract

Prediction is posited to support fluent comprehension of speech—but how and when do young listeners, who encounter unfamiliar and novel events with high frequency, learn to deploy predictive processing strategies in these unfamiliar circumstances? The current work used a discourse-based event teaching paradigm to explore how English-speaking school-aged children (aged 5;0–8;11 [years;months]; N = 92) generalize from their (experimentally controlled) experience to generate real-time linguistic predictions about novel events during an eye-tracked sentence recognition task. The findings reveal developmental differences in how the initial structure of event exposure supports generalization. Specifically, real-time extension was supported by viewing multiple instances of events involving varied agents in the younger children (5–6 years), whereas older children (7–8 years) extended when they experienced repetition of events with identical agents. The findings support accounts of predictive processing suggesting that learners generate predictions in a variety of less predictable circumstances and suggest practical directions to support early learning and language processing skills.