Abstract
We examined the effects of semantic and visual cues of animacy on children’s and adults’ interpretation of ambiguous pronouns, using the visual world paradigm. Participants listened to sentences with object relative clauses that varied the animacy of potential referents, followed by test sentences beginning with a referentially ambiguous subject pronoun he. Participants viewed images of the referents, with semantically inanimate objects (e.g., a TV) shown with or without added facial features. Results from offline verbal report and online gaze data revealed consistent effects of both semantic animacy and visual context on pronoun resolution in both groups: There was a preference for semantically animate referents as antecedent, but this preference decreased or disappeared when semantically inanimate referents had facial features. The results indicate that the use of animacy as a linguistic cue is flexible and responsive to the visual context. They further suggest that like adults (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006), 4-year-olds already use fictional, here visual, context to adjust their online and offline language comprehension preferences.
Highlights
Animacy, or whether an entity is alive and volitional in the real world, is a semantic property with well-documented effects on language processing in both adults and children
Adult language comprehension quickly adapts to story contexts with inanimate objects acting as sentient agents (Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2006), but the extent to which this is true for young children is not known
We report the effects of semantic and visual animacy on pronoun resolution for the children first, followed by the adults
Summary
Whether an entity is alive and volitional in the real world, is a semantic property with well-documented effects on language processing in both adults and children. The semantic animacy of objects, and their representation in various media, do not always align. It is commonplace in child-directed books and media for otherwise perfectly inanimate everyday objects, like the famous Brave Little Toaster (Disch, 1980; Kushner et al, 1987), Cars’ Lightning McQueen (Anderson and Lasseter, 2006), or Beauty and the Beasts’ Mrs Teapot (Hahn et al, 1991), to have features such as eyes and mouths that signal animate agency, intentions, goals, and even personalities. We examine how visual and semantic animacy interact to influence processing of ambiguous pronouns
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