Abstract
Recent research on moment-to-moment language comprehension has revealed striking differences between adults and preschool children. Adults rapidly use the referential principle to resolve syntactic ambiguity, assuming that modification is more likely when there are 2 possible referents for a definite noun phrase. Young children do not. We examine the scope of this phenomenon by exploring whether children use the referential principle to resolve another form of ambiguity. Scalar adjectives (big, small) are typically used to refer to an object when contrasting members of the same category are present in the scene (big and small coins). In the present experiment, 5-year-olds and adults heard instructions like "Point to the big (small) coin" while their eye-movements were measured to displays containing 1 or 2 coins. Both groups rapidly recruited the meaning of the adjective to distinguish between referents of different sizes. Critically, like adults, children were quicker to look to the correct item in trials containing 2 possible referents compared with 1. Nevertheless, children's sensitivity to the referential principle was substantially delayed compared to adults', suggesting possible differences in the recruitment of this top- down cue. The implications of current and previous findings are discussed with respect to the development of the architecture of language comprehension.
Highlights
Our moment-to-moment interpretation of language depends by the words that we hear or read and on the situation in which they occur
We examined children’s use of lexical semantics and referential contrast using the same coarse- and fine-grained analyses employed in Experiment 1
This study explores the use of linguistic meaning and referential contrast in the real-time interpretation of scalar adjectives
Summary
Children’s language processing 2 A bst r act Adult language comprehension is guided by both linguistic and contextual information. Recent work on syntactic parsing suggests that children typically fail to use contextual cues, like the number of potential referents for a noun phrase, during syntactic ambiguity resolution. We examine whether this cue influences children’s interpretation of noun phrases with scalar adjectives (big and tall) which are typically produced only when there are two objects of the same kind in the discourse. Five-year-olds heard instructions like “Point to the big (small) coin,” while their eye-movements were measured to displays containing 1 or 2 coins They looked to the Target more rapidly in trials containing 2 referents, demonstrating that contextual cues rapidly influence children’s real-time language comprehension.
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