Finding a bottle of milk in the bathroom would probably be quite surprising to most of us. Such a surprised reaction is driven by our strong expectations, learned through experience, that a bottle of milk belongs in the kitchen. Our environment is not randomly organized but governed by regularities that allow us to predict what objects can be found in which types of scene . These scene semantics are thought to play an important role in the recognition of objects. But when during development are the semantic predictions so far implemented that such scene-object inconsistencies would lead to semantic processing difficulties? Here we investigated how toddlers perceive their environments, and what expectations govern their attention and perception. To this aim, we used a purely visual paradigm in an ERP experiment and presented 24-month-olds with familiar scenes in which either a semantically consistent or an inconsistent object would appear. The scene-inconsistency effect has been previously studied in adults by means of the N400, a neural marker responding to semantic inconsistencies across many types of stimuli. Our results show that semantic object-scene inconsistencies indeed elicited an enhanced N400 over the left anterior brain region between 750 and 1150 ms post stimulus onset. This modulation of the N400 marker provides first indications that by the age of two toddlers have already established their scene semantics allowing them to detect a purely visual, semantic object-scene inconsistency. Our data suggest the presence of specific semantic knowledge regarding what objects occur in a certain scene category.

Language and action share similar organizational principles. Both are thought to be hierarchical and recursive in nature. Here we address the relationship between language and action from developmental and neurophysiological perspectives. We discuss three major aspects: The extent of the analogy between language and action; the necessity to extend research on the yet largely neglected aspect of action syntax; the positive contribution of a developmental approach to this topic. We elaborate on the claim that adding an ontogenetic approach will help to obtain a comprehensive picture about both the interplay between language and action and its development, and to answer the question whether the underlying mechanisms of detecting syntactic violations of action sequences are similar to or different from the processing of language syntactic violations.