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

Evan Kidd, Andrew J. Stewart, Ludovica Serratrice

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    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. © 2010 Cambridge University Press.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)222-234
    Number of pages12
    JournalJournal of Child Language
    Volume38
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jan 2011

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: The role of the referential scene in garden-path recovery'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this