Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: the role of the referential scene in garden-path recovery.

In this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it became apparent that a test sentence was syntactically ambiguous, suggesting they considered the two alternative analyses in parallel. In contrast, the children appeared not to re-analyze their initial analysis, even over shorter distances than have been investigated in prior research. We argue that this reflects the children's over-reliance on bottom-up, lexical cues to interpretation. The implications for the development of parsing routines are discussed.

[1]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  Sentence processing: A tutorial review. , 1987 .

[2]  M. Coltheart.  Attention and Performance XII: The Psychology of Reading , 1987 .

[3]  M. Just,et al.  From the SelectedWorks of Marcel Adam Just 1992 A capacity theory of comprehension : Individual differences in working memory , 2017 .

[4]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution , 1994 .

[5]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints , 1995, Cognition.

[6]  Irina A. Sekerina,et al.  The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children , 1999, Cognition.

[7]  G. Waters,et al.  Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[8]  Sarah Brown-Schmidt,et al.  One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog: Factors Affecting Children's Syntactic Choices in Production and Comprehension , 2000, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[9]  J. Weissenborn,et al.  Approaches to Bootstrapping: Phonological, lexical, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition. Volume 1 , 2001 .

[10]  Development patterns of brain activity reflecting semantic and syntactic processes , 2001 .

[11]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  Reassessing Working Memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996) , 2002 .

[12]  Jean-Pierre Koenig,et al.  Arguments for adjuncts , 2003, Cognition.

[13]  J. Trueswell,et al.  Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context , 2003 .

[14]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Actions and affordances in syntactic ambiguity resolution. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[15]  J. Trueswell,et al.  The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing , 2004, Cognitive Psychology.

[16]  Evan Kidd,et al.  Lexical and referential cues to sentence interpretation: an investigation of children's interpretations of ambiguous sentences , 2005, Journal of Child Language.

[17]  J. Trueswell,et al.  Cognitive control and parsing: Reexamining the role of Broca’s area in sentence comprehension , 2005, Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience.

[18]  Rachel Shirley Sussman.  Verb-instrument information during on-line processing , 2006 .

[19]  C. Felser,et al.  Grammatical processing in language learners , 2006, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[20]  Evan Kidd,et al.  Lexical and referential influences on on-line spoken language comprehension: A comparison of adults and primary-school-age children , 2007 .

[21]  E. Kidd,et al.  The acquisition of the multiple senses of with , 2008 .

[22]  J. Snedeker.  Effects of prosodic and lexical constraints on parsing in young children (and adults). , 2008, Journal of memory and language.

[23]  John C. Trueswell,et al.  Co-localization of Stroop and Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in Broca's Area: Implications for the Neural Basis of Sentence Processing , 2009, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.