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Abstract:
The present study compares the way English-speaking children
and adults process temporarily ambiguous sentences such as (1):
(1) The student photographed the fans of the actress who was/were
looking happy. One possibility of accounting for both
cross-linguistic and within-language variation in the processing of
relative clause attachment ambiguities is the suggestion that
attachment preferences are determined by the relative strength of
the two interacting locality principles of Late Closure/Recency,
which favours attachment of the relative clause to the second NP,
and Predicate Proximity, which favours NP1 attachment (Gibson et
al., 1996). A number of non-structural factors such as
lexical properties of the preposition joining the two potential
host NPs are also known to affect relative clause attachment
preferences in adults (Gilboy et al., 1995). 29 six to seven
year-old monolingual English children and 37 adult native speakers
of English participated both in an auditory questionnaire study and
a self-paced listening experiment (Ferreira et al., 1996).
The on-line experiment had a 2 x 2 design with the factors
'Preposition' (of vs. with) and 'Attachment' (NP1 vs. NP2).
The experimental sentences were disambiguated by number marking on
the auxiliary (was vs. were). Additionally, the children
underwent (i) a grammaticality judgement test, to ensure that they
had acquired the relevant grammatical knowledge, and (ii) a
listening-span task (Gaulin & Campbell, 1994). The results of
the on-line task can be summarised as follows: Adult speakers'
attachment preferences were influenced by the type of preposition:
They showed a preference for NP1 attachment for complex NPs joined
by of, and a preference for NP2 attachment for NPs joined by with.
For the children, we found a significant interaction between
listening span and attachment preference: While children with a
relatively high listening span showed a preference for NP1
attachment irrespective of the type of preposition, the low-span
children showed a general tendency towards NP2 disambiguation. The
results from the adults indicate that the type of linking
preposition influences on-line processing in adult native
speakers. The results from the children, on the other hand,
suggest that children are guided primarily by structural
information during processing, while disregarding lexical
cues. Whereas the high-span children relied mainly on the
Predicate Proximity principle, the low-span group preferentially
applied the Recency strategy. We argue that the observed
differences between children and adults, as well as those found
between the two span groups, are due to working memory differences
rather than reflecting qualitative differences in the parser.
References
Ferreira, F., J. Henderson, M. Anes, P. Weeks, & D. McFarlane
(1996). Effects of lexical frequency and syntactic complexity
in spoken language comprehension: Evidence from the auditory moving
window technique. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory and Cognition 22, 324-335. Gaulin, C. & T.
Campbell (1994). Procedure for assessing verbal working
memory in normal school-age children: Some preliminary data.
Perceptual and Motor Skills 79, 55-64. Gibson, E., N. Pearlmutter,
E. Canseco-Gonzalez, & G. Hickok (1996). Cross-linguistic
attachment preferences: Evidence from English and Spanish.
Cognition 59, 23-59. Gilboy, E., J. M. Sopena, C. Clifton, & L.
Frazier (1995). Argument structure and association
preferences in Spanish and English compound NPs. Cognition
54, 131-167.
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