Modelling children‘s sentence repetition performance using psycholinguistic predictors

Supervisor(s): Maja Stegenwallner-Schütz (Uni Koblenz), Lena Jäger

• Sentence repetition tasks are a well-established clinical instrument for assessing grammatical development in children. Yet the factors that make individual sentences harder or easier to repeat are rarely quantified systematically.
• Idea: Modelling children's sentence repetition performance based on psycholinguistic annotation: surprisal, word frequency, and syntactic dependencies
• Research questions:
  • 1) To what extent do psycholinguistic variables, in particular syntactic and lexical surprisal, word frequency, and syntactic dependency length, predict children's item-level performance on a German sentence repetition test?
  • 2) Do the predictors interact with syntactic constructions (e.g., relative clauses) that are difficult for children?
• Method: Annotation of items of SET 5-10 subtest (Petermann, 2012) and statistical modelling of data of 42 German-speaking children from this test. Addtional data resources may also be obtained

This project is aimed at (but not limited to) students of MA Linguistics, particularly to those with focus area "Digital Linguistics" or "Psycholinguistics".