The development of predictive processes in children’s discourse understanding

We investigate children’s online predictive processing as it oc-curs naturally, in conversation. We showed 1–7 year-olds short videos of improvised conversation between puppets, control-ling for available linguistic information through phonetic ma-nipulation. Even one- and two-year-old children made ac-curate and spontaneous predictions about when a turn-switch would occur: they gazed at the upcoming speaker before they heard a response begin. This predictive skill relies on both lex-ical and prosodic information together, and is not tied to either type of information alone. We suggest that children integrate prosodic, lexical, and visual information to effectively predict upcoming linguistic material in conversation