Role of Iconicity in Children's Production of Adverbial Clauses: Experimental Data, 2022-2023

Theakston, Anna and Brandt, Silke and Zhang, Shijie (2025). Role of Iconicity in Children's Production of Adverbial Clauses: Experimental Data, 2022-2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-858090

LuCiD's mission is to transform our understanding of how children learn to talk, and deliver the scientific evidence needed to design effective interventions in early years education and healthcare.

Learning to use language to communicate effectively is hugely important for society. Many children enter school without the language skills they need to succeed in the classroom, and these early weaknesses in language and communication are a major predictor of educational and social inequality in later life. To tackle this problem, we need to know the answers to a number of questions: How do children learn language from what they see and hear? What do measures of children's brain activity tell us about what they know at different ages? How do differences between children and differences in their environments affect how children learn to talk? Answering these questions is a major challenge for researchers, but, in the first phase of LuCiD, we have made great strides towards meeting this challenge by bringing together researchers from a range of different research backgrounds and with a range of different research skills.

In its next phase, LuCiD will build on this success by coordinating three research streams in the UK and abroad.

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STREAM 3: BEYOND 0-5: will build on LuCiD's 0-5 project - a study of 80 children's language learning across the first 5 years - by a) using the 0-5 data to understand how children's curiosity-based exploration shapes their word learning; b) using the 0-5 data to build individualized computer models of how particular children perform across different experiments and across development; and c) following the 0-5 children into school and determining how their preschool language abilities impact on the beginnings of their literacy development.

In this research, we will seek to understand language learning using a range of different methods. We will observe and record children in natural interaction as well as studying their language in more controlled experiments and using behavioural measures and correlations with brain activity (EEG). Combining information collected using these different methods will constrain the types of explanations that can be proposed; and using computer models to understand our results will help us to create more accurate and comprehensive theories of how children learn.

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Data description (abstract)

Young children's comprehension of adverbial clauses is significantly affected by iconicity, which refers to whether the order of information in the sentence reflects the order of events in the real world. In contrast, clause order (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main) and input frequency of specific adverbial clauses do not seem to play independent roles (De Ruiter et al., 2018).

The present study tests children's sentence production across four different connective types (after, before, because, if) to determine whether the factors that underpin the comprehension of adverbial clauses also apply to production, which involves utterance planning and articulation. 42 four-year-old, 42 five-year-old, and 22 eight-year-old monolingual English-speaking children, along with 20 adult controls, completed a sentence completion task.

The results showed that both four- and five-year-olds produced all type of sentences in iconic order (“She builds a tower, before she breaks her train”; “After she builds a tower, she breaks her train”) more accurately than in non-iconic order. This suggests that while comprehension and production likely impose different demands on children, iconicity as a general semantic strategy benefits children's early processing of adverbial clauses. Moreover, the effect of iconicity persisted in older children's production, but only for their because- and if-sentences, which could be related to their semantic complexity and the pragmatic properties they encode.

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