The Development of Predictive Gender Processing Strategies During Noun Phrase Decoding: An Eye-Tracking Study With German 5- to 10-Year-Old Children.

PURPOSE: Many models of language comprehension assume that listeners predict the continuation of an incoming linguistic stimulus immediately after its onset, based on only partial linguistic and contextual information. Their related developmental models try to determine which cues (e.g., semantic or morphosyntactic) trigger such prediction, and to which extent, during different periods of language acquisition. One morphosyntactic cue utilized predictively in many languages, inter alia German, is grammatical gender. However, studies of the developmental trajectories of the acquisition of predictive gender processing in German remain a few. METHOD: This study attempts to shed light on such processing strategies used in noun phrase decoding among children acquiring German as their first language by examining their eye movements during a language-picture matching task (N = 78, 5-10 years old). Its aim was to confirm whether the eye movements indicated the presence of age-specific differences in the processing of a gender cue, provided either in isolation or in combination with a semantic cue. RESULTS: The results revealed that German children made use of predictive gender processing strategies from the age of 5 years onward; however, the pace of online gender processing, as well as confidence in the predicted continuation, increased up to the age of 10 years. CONCLUSION: Predictive processing of gender cues plays a role in German language comprehension even in children younger than 8 years.

School Entry Plays an Insignificant Role in Attention Performance, Impulse Control, and Motor Activity of Same-Aged Children from Preschool and Elementary School.

The transition from preschool to elementary school places demands on children to pay attention, control their impulses, and avoid fidgeting. However, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have investigated whether these characteristics are influenced by elementary school entry. The current study compares same-aged preschool and elementary-school children regarding their attention performance, impulse control, and motor activity. A total of 60 children (30 preschool and 30 elementary school; 6 years old) underwent the Quantified Behavior (Qb) Test. The children's parents responded to a conventional questionnaire for measuring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. We found that formal schooling (mean: 3 months) did not significantly affect the examined variables (p > .05). The results imply that improvements in questionnaire and computer test scores shown by previous studies are rather caused by maturation than the educational context. The assumption that inattention ratings increase after school entry because inattention can be better observed in an academic setting could not be verified either. Our study substantiates that the normative data used in clinical practice need not consider the educational context.