Behavioral methods for investigating morphological and syntactic processing in children

While most first language acquisition research to date has focused on the development of children’s linguistic competence, a number of research teams have also investigated the mechanisms children employ to process sentence-level and word-level information in real time, by applying experimental techniques familiar from the adult processing literature to children. This chapter presents an overview of different kinds of behavioral tasks for investigating both morphological and syntactic processing in children focusing on three techniques that we have explored in our own research on children’s on-line language processing: self-paced listening, cross-modal priming, and speeded production.