Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present research explored the development of prediction systems in 24- and 30-month-old toddlers in a visual-world-paradigm. Participants heard a sentence that included a correction (“no”) or a conjunction (“and”) while seeing an array of pictures with an associatively related noun (“cat”) and the erroneous noun (“dog”). The young group showed signs of early prediction of the associative picture on both types of sentences while the older group showed signs of an early prediction of the coordination condition, but a later prediction in the correction sentences. Our results suggest that older toddlers deployed different predictive systems, while the younger group used the same system.