Information structure cues for 4-year-olds and adults: tracking eye movements to visually presented anaphoric referents

Abstract

Studies on young children's online comprehension of pronominal reference suggests that children follow similar syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints as adults. However, the observed effects are less stable and appear much later in the eye-movement record than in adults. It is not clear whether this is because children are cued by a different set of factors than adults; or whether children use the same set of constraints, like subjecthood or first mention, but the delay is caused by the developmental stage in which these cues are not yet fully acquired. We added an information structure cue (focus) and asked whether it affects syntactically more- or less-salient discourse referents (subjects/objects) the same way and shows a similar pattern in adults and children or whether it modulates the reliance on syntactic salience in children. Four-year-old German children and adults listened to stories with focused or unfocused syntactically prominent and non-prominent entities, subjects and objects, while we registered their eye movements to visually presented antecedents for ambiguous pronouns. Syntactic and information structural prominence interacted for children: focusing increased the looks to the syntactically salient subject antecedents, but not to the syntactically less salient object antecedents. This suggests that clefting helps children to locate the preferred antecedent. Adults' pronoun resolution in contrast was not modulated by clefting in a clear way. Instead, they showed an overall effect of syntactic prominence. Our study suggests that children and adults are sensitive to the same structural cues in reference resolution but that these constraints may not yet be fully acquired. The process may be enhanced, but not modified, with additional cues such as clefts.