Weighall, AR orcid.org/0000-0002-6736-287X (2008) The kindergarten path effect revisited: Children’s use of context in processing structural ambiguities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 99 (2). pp. 75-95. ISSN 0022-0965
Abstract
Research with adults has shown that ambiguous spoken sentences are resolved efficiently, exploiting multiple cues--including referential context--to select the intended meaning. Paradoxically, children appear to be insensitive to referential cues when resolving ambiguous sentences, relying instead on statistical properties intrinsic to the language such as verb biases. The possibility that children's insensitivity to referential context may be an artifact of the experimental design used in previous work was explored with 60 4- to 11-year-olds. An act-out task was designed to discourage children from making incorrect pragmatic inferences and to prevent premature and ballistic responses by enforcing delayed actions. Performance on this task was compared directly with the standard act-out task used in previous studies. The results suggest that young children (5 years) do not use contextual information, even under conditions designed to maximize their use of such cues, but that adult-like processing is evident by approximately 8 years of age. These results support and extend previous findings by Trueswell and colleagues (Cognition (1999), Vol. 73, pp. 89-134) and are consistent with a constraint-based learning account of children's linguistic development.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Copyright © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Syntactic ambiguity resolution; Act-out task; Language development; Spoken language comprehension; Prepositional phrases |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Psychology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 09 Sep 2019 09:54 |
Last Modified: | 09 Sep 2019 09:54 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jecp.2007.10.004 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:94680 |
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