Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T05:00:21.572Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2010

ANNA R. WEIGHALL  and
GERRY T. M. ALTMANN
ANNA R. WEIGHALL*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Sociology & Politics, Sheffield Hallam University
GERRY T. M. ALTMANN
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of York
*
Address for correspondence: Dr Anna R. Weighall, Department of Psychology, Sociology & Politics, Faculty of Development and Society, Sheffield Hallam University, Collegiate Crescent Campus, Sheffield S10 2BP, UK. tel:+44 114 225 5563; fax:+44 114 225 2430; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativization. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context. Pragmatically appropriate contexts exerted a positive effect on relative clause comprehension, but children with higher memory spans demonstrated a further benefit for main clauses. Comprehension for centre-embedded main clauses was found to be very poor, independently of either context or memory span. The results suggest that children have access to adult-like linguistic processing mechanisms, and that sensitivity to extralinguistic cues is evident in young children and develops as cognitive capacity increases.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , June 2011 , pp. 579 - 605
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a BBSRC studentship awarded to Anna Weighall while at the University of York. Andrew Thompson drew the pictures used in the experiment, and in Figure 1. We thank the children who participated in the study and their primary school for their involvement, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

References

REFERENCES

Bates, E., Devescovi, A. & D'Amico, S. (1999). Processing complex sentences: A cross-linguistic study. Language and Cognitive Processes 14, 69–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model. In MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (eds), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing, 3–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Booth, J. R., MacWhinney, B. & Harasaki, Y. (2000). Developmental differences in visual and auditory processing of complex sentences. Child Development 74, 981–1003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, J. D., MacWhinney, B., Flatt, M. & Provost, J. (1993). PsyScope: A new graphic interactive environment for designing psychology experiments. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 25, 257–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Correa, L. M. (1995). An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24, 183–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S. & Steedman, M. J. (1985). On not being led up the garden path: The use of context by the psychological parser. In Dowty, D., Karttunen, L. & Zwicky, A. (eds), Natural language parsing: Psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives, 320–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahan, D. & Tanenhaus, M. (2005). Looking at the rope when looking for the snake: Conceptually mediated eye movements during spoken-word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12, 453–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daneman, M. & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). Individual differences in working memory and reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 19, 450–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, S. (2002). Interpretation of relative clauses by young children: Another look. Journal of Child Language 29, 177–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Felser, C., Marinis, T. & Clahsen, H. (2003). Children's processing of ambiguous sentences: A study of relative clause attachment. Language Acquisition 11, 127–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ford, J. D., Bresnan, J. W. & Kaplan, R. M. (1982). A competence based theory of syntactic closure. In Bresnan, J. W. (ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations, 727–96. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fragman, C., Goodluck, H. & Heggie, L. (2007). Child and adult construal of restrictive relative clauses: Knowledge of grammar and differential effects of syntactic context. Journal of Child Language 34, 345–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frazier, L. (1987). Sentence processing: A tutorial review. In Coltheart, M. (ed.), Attention and performance XII: The psychology of reading, 539–86. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Friedman, N. & Novogrodsky, R. (2004). The acquisition of relative clause comprehension in Hebrew: A study of SLI and normal development. Journal of Child Language 31, 661–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaulin, C. A. & Campbell, T. F. (1994). Procedure for assessing verbal working memory in normal school-age children: Some preliminary data. Perceptual and Motor Skills 79, 55–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goodluck, H. (1990). Knowledge integration in processing and acquisition: Comments on Grimshaw and Rosen. In Frazier, L. & De Villiers, J. (eds), Language processing and language acquisition, 369–82. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodluck, H. & Tavakolian, S. (1982). Competence and processing in children's grammar of relative clauses. Cognition 11, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R. & Johnson, M. (2001). Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 27, 1411–23.Google ScholarPubMed
Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R. & Levine, W. H. (2002). Memory load interference in syntactic processing. Psychological Science 13, 425–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hamburger, H. & Crain, S. (1982). Relative acquisition. In Kuczaj, S. (eds), Language development II, 245–74. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Huettig, F. & Altmann, G. T. M. (2004). The online processing of ambiguous and unambiguous words in context: Evidence from head-mounted eye-tracking. In Carreiras, M. & Clifton, C. (eds), The on-line study of sentence comprehension: Eyetracking, ERP, and beyond, 187–207. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Huettig, F. & Altmann, G. T. M. (2005). Word meaning and the control of eye fixation: Semantic competitor effects and the visual world paradigm. Cognition 96, B23–B32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huettig, F. & Altmann, G. T. M. (2007). Visual-shape competition during language-mediated attention is based on lexical input and not modulated by contextual appropriateness. Visual Cognition 15, 985–1018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review 99, 122–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A. & Keller, T. A. (1996). The capacity theory of comprehension: New frontiers of evidence and arguments. Psychological Review 103, 773–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kidd, E. (2003). Relative clause comprehension revisited: Commentary on Eisenberg (2002). Journal of Child Language 30, 671–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kidd, E. & Bavin, E. L. (2002). English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: Evidence for general cognitive and language specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 31, 599–617.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kidd, E. & Bavin, E. L. (2007). Lexical and referential influences on on-line spoken language comprehension: A comparison of adults and primary school children. First Language 27, 29–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kidd, E., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2007). Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses. Language and Cognitive Processes 22, 860–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, M. C. & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review 109, 35–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacDonald, M. C., Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity. Cognitive Psychology 24, 56–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B. & Pleh, C. (1988). The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian. Cognition 29, 95–141.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mak, W. M., Vonk, W. & Schriefers, H. (2002). The influence of animacy on relative clause processing. Journal of Memory and Language 47, 50–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelsohn, A. and Pearlmutter, N. (1999). Individual differences in attachment preferences. Poster presented at the 12th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York.Google Scholar
Miller, G. A. (1962). Some psychological studies of grammar. American Psychologist 17, 748–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nation, K., Adams, J. W., Bowyer-Crane, C. A. & Snowling, M. J. (1999). Working memory deficits in poor comprehenders reflect underlying language impairments. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 73, 139–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pearlmutter, N. J. & MacDonald, M. C. (1995). Individual differences and probabilistic constraints in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 34, 521–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seidenberg, M. & MacDonald, M. C. (1999). A probabilistic constraints approach to language acquisition and processing. Cognitive Science 23, 569–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheldon, A. (1974). The role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, 272–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheldon, A. (1977). On strategies for processing relative clauses: A comparison of children and adults. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 6, 305–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1973). Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development, 175–208. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. C. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology, 49, 238–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snedeker, J. & Yuan, S. (2008). Effects of prosodic and lexical constraints on parsing in young children (and adults). Journal of Memory and Language 58, 574–608.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spivey-Knowlton, M. & Tanenhaus, M. (1994). Referential context and syntactic ambiguity resolution. In Clifton, C., Frazier, L. & Rayner, K. (eds), Perspectives on sentence processing, 415–39, Hillsdale, NJ: LEA Press.Google Scholar
Stothard, S. E. & Hulme, C. (1992). Reading comprehension difficulties in children: The role of language comprehension and working memory skills. Reading and Writing 4, 245–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swets, B., Desmut, T., Hambrick, D. Z. & Ferreira, F. (2007). The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: A psychometric approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136, 64–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M. & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science 268, 1632–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tavakolian, S. L. (1981). The conjoined-clause analysis of relative clauses. In Tavakolian, S. L. (ed.), Language acquisition and linguistic theory, 167–87. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Townsend, D. & Erb, M. (1975). Children's strategies for interpreting complex comparative questions. Journal of Child Language 2, 1–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Townsend, D., Ottaviano, D. & Bever, T. (1979). Immediate memory for words from main and subordinate clauses at different age levels. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 8, 83–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traxler, M. (2002). Plausibility and subcategorisation preference in children's processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences: Evidence from self-paced reading. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 55A, 75–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traxler, M. J., Morris, R. K. & Seeley, R. E. (2002). Processing subject and object relative clauses: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language 47, 69–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traxler, M. J., Williams, R. S., Blozis, S. A. & Morris, R. K. (2005). Working memory, animacy, and verb class in the processing of relative clauses. Journal of Memory and Language 53, 204–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trueswell, J. C. & Gleitman, L. (2004). Children's eye movements during listening: Developmental evidence for a constraint-based theory of sentence processing. In Henderson, J. M. & Ferreira, F. (eds), The interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world, 319–46. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M. & Logrip, L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition 73, 89–134.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wanner, E. & Maratsos, M. (1978). An ATN approach to comprehension. In Halle, M., Bresnan, J. & Miller, G. A. (eds), Linguistic theory and psychological reality, 119–61. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Weighall, A. (2008). On still being led down the kindergarten path: Children's processing of structural ambiguities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 99, 75–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar