Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions in Children’s Sentence Processing

Abstract

The present study examines whether children reactivate a moved constituent at its gap position and how children's more limited working memory span affects the way they process filler-gap dependencies. 46 5-7 year-old children and 54 adult controls participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment and underwent a standardized working memory test. The results revealed a statistically significant interaction between the participants' working memory span and antecedent reactivation: High-span children (n = 19) and high-span adults (n = 22) showed evidence of antecedent priming at the gap site, while for low-span children and adults, there was no such effect. The antecedent priming effect in the high-span participants indicates that in both children and adults, dislocated arguments access their antecedents at gap positions. The absence of an antecedent reactivation effect in the low-span participants could mean that these participants required more time to integrate the dislocated constituent and reactivated the filler later during the sentence.

The Processing and Interpretation of Verb Phrase Ellipsis Constructions by Children at Normal and Slowed Speech Rates

“…The lack of significant interactions between age and relatedness indicates not that priming effects differed as a function of age but instead suggest that children across the range of ages in our study had adultlike priming with normal-rate input. These results are consistent with prior findings of adultlike online co-reference processing in children in this same age range (Love, 2007; Love et al, 2009; Roberts et al, 2007), including results that, like ours, revealed no effects of age on priming (Love et al, 2009; Experiment 1). It is not surprising then that no age effects on priming were observed with slow speech input: If children in this age range have adultlike priming with normal-rate input, then slow speech input should disrupt priming consistently across this age range as well.…”

“…These results are the same as found previously for adults in priming studies on ellipsis constructions (Shapiro et al, 2003; Shapiro & Hestvik, 1995) and suggest that school-age children have adultlike mastery of the automatic processes underlying the establishment of dependency relations in elliptical constructions. These findings are also consistent with the results of previous studies suggesting that children have mastered the automatic processes underlying dependency relations in other constructions, including with anaphors (Booth, MacWhinney, & Harasaki, 2000; Love et al, 2009; McKee et al, 1993; Roberts et al, 2007; Sekerina, Stromswold, & Hestvik, 2004). With a slowed rate of speech input (Experiment 1B), priming effects were observed for the strict interpretation but not for the sloppy interpretation immediately at the offset of the ellipsis phrase.…”

“…In the sentence “The policeman washed his car,” the referent of the possessive pronoun ( his ) is established via a dependency relation with its antecedent ( the policeman ; Chomsky, 1981, 1986). Research into the auditory comprehension of nominal anaphors has demonstrated that children as young as age 4½ years display adultlike automatic processing of these forms but do not master conscious, metalinguistic interpretation of anaphors equally until several years later, with metalinguistic mastery of pronouns delayed relative to that of reflexives (Chien & Wexler, 1990; Love, 2007; Love et al, 2009; McKee, Nicol, & McDaniel, 1993; Roberts, Marinis, Felser, & Clahsen, 2007). …”

Effects of Working Memory Capacity and Tasks in Processing L2 Complex Sentence: Evidence from Chinese-English Bilinguals

“…Following the study of Hestvik et al (2012) and also that of Roberts et al (2007), we assigned subjects to the low span group if their span was less than or equal to the median of the group's operation span, and to the high span group if it was greater than the median. As a result, there were 25 high span subjects ( M = 64.06, SD = 5.24) and 25 low span subjects ( M = 38.20, SD = 8.27).…”

Working Memory Effects of Gap-Predictions in Normal Adults: An Event-Related Potentials Study

“…In a recent paper, Roberts et al (2007) examined whether working memory differences among adults and children resulted in different patterns of antecedent reactivation in filler-gap constructions. They used the cross-modal picture priming method (Love and Swinney 1997; Love 2007) to test for immediate antecedent reactivation of relativized noun phrases in double object constructions, where the gap was non-adjacent to the verb.…”