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Article published In:
Processing in Bilingual Children
Edited by Chantal van Dijk, Jasmijn E. Bosch and Sharon Unsworth
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 14:4] 2024
► pp. 544–576

Prediction in bilingual sentence processing

Is it linked to production?

ORCID logo | Bar-Ilan University
ORCID logo | Middlebury College
ORCID logo | The City University of New York

The Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2012) accounts for cross-linguistic differences in thematic role mapping. We investigated production and predictive use of accusative case morphology in Russian-Hebrew bilingual children. We also investigated the role of production in predictive processing testing the Prediction-by-Production Account (Pickering & Garrod, 2018) vs. the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White, 2000). Three groups of children aged 4–8 participated: Russian-Hebrew-speaking bilinguals, Russian-speaking and Hebrew-speaking monolingual controls. All children participated in the accusative case production and Visual-World eye-tracking comprehension experiments. Bilinguals were tested in both of their languages. The results of the study confirmed the predictions of the Unified Competition Model showing typological differences in the strength of the case-marking cue and its predictive use in sentence processing in Russian- and Hebrew-speaking controls. While Russian-speaking monolinguals relied on case marking to predict the upcoming agent/patient, the performance of Hebrew-speaking monolingual children varied. The findings for bilinguals showed that despite their lower production accuracy in both languages, they were either indistinguishable from monolinguals or showed an advantage in the predictive use of case morphology. The findings support the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis, which predicts a dissociation between production and comprehension.

Keywords: sentence processing, prediction, Russian, Hebrew, case morphology, Visual-World, Visual-World paradigm (eye-tracking)
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Predictive processing in children: Comprehension vs. production
    • 1.2Accusative case marking and word order in Russian and Hebrew
    • 1.3The current study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Design and materials
      • 2.2.1Expressive vocabulary in Russian and Hebrew
      • 2.2.2Production experiments: ACC case in Russian and Hebrew
      • 2.2.3VWP experiments: On-line comprehension of the ACC case in Russian and Hebrew
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Eye-tracking data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1ACC case production accuracy in Russian and Hebrew
    • 3.2VWP experiments: ACC case comprehension in Russian and in Hebrew
    • 3.3The effect of age
    • 3.4The role of the ACC case production in comprehension
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Future research and conclusions
  • Data availability
  • Competing interests
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 March 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.22102.mei
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