Incremental Processing Of Telicity In Italian Children.pdf

Italian children between the ages of 8 and 10 incrementally process telicity in event descriptions. They use temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension in a visual context. When hearing a perfective aspectual morpheme, participants looked more at the completed event than an ongoing event.

In the study, 26 monolingual Italian children were presented with a visual scenario depicting two pictures showing completed or ongoing actions. They heard Italian sentences with a verb in the passato prossimo tense, in which the auxiliary (ha) is combined with a past participle to trigger the completion interpretation.

The children's eye-movements were recorded in three conditions: Aspect, Semantic, and No-Prediction. In the Aspect condition, the pictures displayed two actions at a different state of completion, so that the correct picture could be selected based on the aspectual information morphologically expressed by the verb. In the Semantic condition, the correct picture could be selected on the basis of the lexical meaning of the verb. In the No-Prediction condition, the target picture could only be selected upon hearing the direct object.

The results showed that children started directing their gaze to the target before the final noun is heard in the first two conditions. They were faster in the Semantic condition than in the Aspect condition. The proportion of looks to the target during the determiner was significantly greater in the Semantic condition compared to the other conditions.

This pattern suggests that monolingual Italian children are able to incrementally integrate the aspectual information expressed by the verb, although this takes longer than the integration of the simple lexical meaning of the verb.