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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2010

EVAN KIDD ,
ANDREW J. STEWART  and
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE
EVAN KIDD*
Affiliation:
La Trobe University & The University of Manchester
ANDREW J. STEWART
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester
*
Address for correspondence: Evan Kidd, School of Psychological Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora 3086, Victoria, Australia. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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 reanalyze 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.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 222 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported in part by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a Charles La Trobe Research Fellowship awarded to the first author. We would like to thank Jenny Habjan and Anna Roby for help with testing, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

References

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