International audienceStudies 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/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 and that the time delay results from these constraints being not yet fully acquired. The process may be enhanced, but not modified, with additional cues such as clefts
This special issue on language complexity and its role in theoretical and psycholinguistics is warmly dedicated to Professor Jussi Niemi on the occasion of his 64 th birthday and becoming professor emeritus. It deals with many research issues that have been central to Jussi's prolific scientific career, including the relationships between structural and cognitive models of language, morphological and syntactic complexity, structure and processing of idioms, and the study of both acquired and developmental language disorders as a window to the workings of the mind/ brain. In addition to the editors, many of the present authors are former students and colleagues of Jussi's. It is thus no coincidence then that the contributions to this issue share his insight into the necessity of a cross-disciplinary approach to further our understanding of language and language use. This collection of papers addresses the relationship between the structural complexity of language and the means and limits of human cognitive capacity to represent and process formally and semantically simplex and complex words as well as multi-word constructions. The articles approach the issue of lexical and conceptual complexity by cutting across disciplines from formal linguistic theories via psycholinguistics to neuroscience, highlighting the value and importance of cross-disciplinary approaches.In the opening paper, Karlsson provides a modern view of structural complexity as it is understood in linguistic theory, its many-faceted meaning and how it can be considered to evolve from simpler forms. By covering the period of the past 200 years, including the present day linguistics, the chapter considers the evolvement -complexification, if you will -of views on complexity at different linguistic levels.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.