Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While effects of animacy and attention have been studied quite extensively in adult speakers, less is known about their role in child language production. In the present study we fill this gap by testing German-speaking preschool children in two language production tasks using eye-tracking. We find that animacy does neither affect the production of transitive sentences nor the production of conjoined noun phrases. By contrast, we find significant effects of attentional orienting. Children were more likely to first fixate an entity when it had been preceded by a visual cue and was hence in their focus of attention. While this held true across tasks, attentional orienting only affected children's production of conjoined noun phrases but not the production of transitive sentences. Effects of attentional orienting therefore seem conditioned by language production affordances. In sum, our findings provide new evidence that animacy and attention play different roles in children's language production.