We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical Looking-While-Listening task. Children were presented with sentences and pictures of two objects representing nouns characterised by either the same gender (determiner was uninformative) or a different gender (determiner was informative). As expected, 20-month-old children recognised the target picture when this was named, and they were faster in the different-gender condition. Interestingly, 12-month-old infants identified the target picture only when presented with an informative determiner (different-gender condition). These results suggest that, as early as 12 months of age and with an improvement seen at 20 months of age, toddlers can extract and use determiner gender features to enhance comprehension and make predictions about upcoming words.

我们调查了 12 个月和 20 个月大的意大利儿童的在线早期理解，重点关注限定词携带的形态句法特征（即性别）在促进理解和预测即将到来的单词方面的作用。采用了自然眼动追踪程序，记录了经典的边看边听任务中的注视行为。向儿童展示了代表名词的两个物体的句子和图片，这些名词具有相同性别（限定词没有信息）或不同性别（限定词有信息）的特征。正如预期的那样，20 个月大的孩子在命名时识别了目标图片，并且在不同性别的情况下他们更快。有趣的是，12 个月大的婴儿只有在提供信息丰富的确定词（不同性别条件）时才能识别目标图片。这些结果表明，早在 12 个月大并且在 20 个月大时有所改善，幼儿就可以提取和使用限定词性别特征来增强理解力并预测即将到来的单词。