GRAMMATICAL ATTRACTION ERROR DETECTION IN CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

- Children and adolescents frequently make grammatical attraction errors.
- Attraction errors arise because writers fail to inhibit an automated heuristic strategy.
- There might be a developmental shift in the precise locus of attraction errors.
- Children reveal a detection failure whereas adolescents detect that their response is not fully warranted

Children and adolescents often make grammatical errors in sentences such as saying “the friend of our neighbors smile” instead of “the friend of our neighbor smiles”. Recent research suggests that these attraction errors arise because they fail to inhibit an automated but inappropriate heuristic strategy that makes them blindly agree the verb with the immediately preceding word. However, it is unclear whether these errors predominantly result from a failure to complete the inhibition or from a failure to detect that the strategy is erroneous and needs to be inhibited in the first place. The present study focuses on a test of the critical error detection sensitivity issue. Children and adolescents were asked to solve grammatical problems and indicated their response confidence. Adolescents showed a clear confidence decrease after having committed an attraction error which was less pronounced in the group of children. This indicates that although children might not detect the inappropriate nature of their answer, adolescents have a better grammatical understanding than their errors seem to suggest.