Discourse matters? The role of discourse relations and type of events in child production and comprehension of sentence negation (C05)

• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509468465

Studies show that children and adults have difficulties when processing negative sentences compared to affirmative ones. These difficulties seem to disappear when negated sentences are embedded in an appropriate discourse context. Using sentence completion tasks, speeded picture-matching tasks and eye-tracking experiments, the project investigates in how far three to five-year-old children benefit from discourse information - as operationalized in terms of discourse relations and type of events - when processing affirmative and negative sentences. We expect that children’s ability to integrate discourse information during sentence processing is positively associated with age, grammatical and lexical abilities.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1629: Negation in language and beyond (NegLaB)
• Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Project Heads: Professorin Dr. Angela Grimm, since 1/2024; Professor Dr. Jacopo Torregrossa, since 1/2024