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Adults process wh- object questions incrementally and predictively: they
integrate fronted wh-phrases immediately upon encountering their anticipated
position, as evidenced by filled-gap effects. Atkinson et al., (2018)
argues that 5 year-olds don’t show filled-gap effects. By separating
active-filling and incremental integration, the current study shows that 19
month-olds interpret the fronted wh-phrase as the direct object upon
hearing the verb in sentences like: what is she wiping with the tig? (where tig is a novel noun). This demonstrates that, before age 2,
infants rapidly
deploy their knowledge of argument structure to interpret non-local
arguments.