The current study investigated the contribution of multiple verbal and working memory (WM) skills to morphosyntactic prediction in Turkish-speaking 4- to 8-year-old children. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, 76 children were presented with verb-final sentences with nominative and accusative case markers on the initial noun (e.g., the fast rabbitnominative … the carrotaccusativeeatfuture vs. the fast rabbitaccusative … the foxnominativeeatfuture) while they were looking at a visual display with three objects (e.g., rabbit, carrot, and fox). Importantly, the case markers on the initial noun could be used to predict the second noun in these sentences. The results revealed that when children’s early productive vocabulary and language production skills were higher, the better and faster they were in predicting the upcoming noun. The episodic buffer, a component of WM, was also positively associated with children’s morphosyntactic prediction abilities. The implications of these results for the mechanisms of linguistic prediction are discussed.

中文翻译：

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语言和工作记忆技能在土耳其语儿童的形态句法预测中的作用

当前的研究调查了多种语言和工作记忆 (WM) 技能对 4 至 8 岁土耳其语儿童的形态句法预测的贡献。在一项视觉世界眼动追踪实验中，向 76 名儿童展示了动词结尾的句子，首字母带有主格和宾格标记（例如，快兔主格……胡萝卜宾格吃未来对比快兔宾格……狐狸主格吃未来) 当他们正在看一个包含三个对象（例如，兔子、胡萝卜和狐狸）的视觉显示时。重要的是，初始名词上的格标记可用于预测这些句子中的第二个名词。结果显示，当儿童早期产生的词汇量和语言产生能力越高时，他们对即将到来的名词的预测就越好、越快。情景缓冲器是 WM 的一个组成部分，也与儿童的形态句法预测能力呈正相关。讨论了这些结果对语言预测机制的影响。