Jellybeans… or Jelly, Beans…? 5-6-year-olds can identify the prosody of compounds but not lists

Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in production, at least for early-acquired noun-noun compounds (Yuen et al., 2021). This raises the question of whether children this age can also use naturally-produced prosody to identify noun-noun compounds from their list forms in comprehension. The results show that 5-6-year-olds (N = 28) can only identify compounds. Unlike adults, children as a group could not use boundary cues to identify lists and were significantly slower in their processing compared to adults. This suggests that the acquisition of word level prosody may precede the acquisition of phrase level prosody, i.e., some higher-level aspects of phrasal prosody may take longer to acquire.

Adaptation to syntactic structures in native and nonnative sentence comprehension

Previous research suggests that native speakers quickly adapt to the properties of the language in the surrounding context. For instance, as they repeatedly read a structure that is initially nonpreferred or infrequent, they show a reduction of processing difficulty. Adaptation has been accounted for in terms of error-based learning: the error resulting from the difference between the expected and actual input leads to an adjustment of the knowledge representation, which changes future expectations. The present study tested whether experiencing an error is sufficient for adaptation. We compared native English speakers and second language (L2) learners’ processing of, and adaptation to, two types of temporarily ambiguous structures that were resolved toward the nonpreferred interpretation. Whereas both native English and L2 speakers showed increased reading times at the disambiguating word versus a nonambiguous control, our data suggest that only native English speakers adapted, and only to one of the two structures. These results suggest that experiencing an error is not sufficient for adaptation, and that factors such as ease of revision and task effects may play a role as well.

Word versus Image

During news coverage of various events, images are treasured as important and even necessary—so much so that journalists—those whose livelihoods depend on the weight of the word—treat pictures as superior to words when they claim with conviction that, when tragedy strikes, the pictures write it best. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is the cliché of choice when we champion pictures for achieving what words fail to accomplish. While we often embrace the influence of the image, there is a major exception. When the dead enter the frame, our opinion of the news image dynamically flip-flops, revealing a remarkable anti-picture prejudice where words are now vastly preferred.