Children's application of binding during sentence processing

McDaniel, Dana; McKee, Cecile; Nicol, Janet

doi:10.1080/01690969308406956

Cited by 37 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…There is a growing body of literature investigating children's sentence processing in real time using on-line techniques that are familiar from adult sentence processing studies, such as self-paced reading and listening (Booth, Perfetti, & MacWhinney 1999;Traxler, 2002;Felser, Marinis & Clahsen, 2003), cross-modal priming (McKee, Nicol, & McDaniel 1993;Love & Swinney, 2007), eye-tracking (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip 1999;Sekerina, Stromswold, & Hestvik, 2004), and event-related brain potentials (Friederici & Hahne, 2001). What emerges from these studies is that children from the age of 4-6 years employ essentially the same parsing mechanism as adults and that any child-adult differences observed in these experiments can be attributed to other factors such as children's more limited working memory capacity, their reduced lexicon, or slower speed of lexical retrieval relative to adults.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions in Children’s Sentence Processing

Roberts

Marinis

Felser

et al. 2006

J Psycholinguist Res

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions in Children’s Sentence Processing

Roberts

Marinis

Felser

et al. 2006

J Psycholinguist Res

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“…The picture was related to one of the meanings of the ambiguous word, and priming (as compared to controls) was measured. Needless to say, this task requires considerable training, and has high drop-out rates among younger children (McKee, Nicol & McDaniel, 1993).…”

Section: Real-time Methods For Use With Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Until quite recently, only the heroic (perhaps we should say fool-hardy) investigators attempted real-time methods with child participants (Holcomb, Coffey & Neville, 1992;McKee, Nicol, & McDaniel, 1993;Swinney & Prather, 1989;Tyler, 1983;Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logrip, 1999;Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 1981). Holcomb et al (1992) examined ERPs of children, showing that children as young as 5 years showed the N400 response typical of adults when they hear semantically anomalous sentences.…”

Section: Real-time Methods For Use With Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…McKee et al (1993) employed the Swinney & Prather (1989) cross-modal priming method to study antecedent activation of referential expressions, such as reflexives. This study focused primarily on acquisition issues related to children"s discovery of syntactic constraints on co-reference (Principles A and B; Chomsky, 1981).…”

Section: Real-time Methods For Use With Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning to parse and its implications for language acquisition

Trueswell

Gleitman

2012

The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics

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This article describes what is known about the adult end-state, namely, that the adult listener recovers the syntactic structure of an utterance in real-time via interactive probabilistic parsing procedures. It examines evidence indicating that similar mechanisms are at work quite early during language learning, such that infants and toddlers attempt to parse the speech stream probabilistically. In the case of learning, though, the parsing is in aid of discovering relevant lower-level linguistic formatives such as syllables and words. Experimental observations about child sentence-processing abilities are still quite sparse, owing in large part to the difficulty in applying adult experimental procedures to child participants; reaction time, reading, and linguistic judgement methods have all have been attempted with children. The article discusses real-time sentence processing in adults, experimental exploration of child sentence processing, eye movements during listening and the kindergarten-path effect, verb biases in syntactic ambiguity resolution, prosody and lexical biases in child parsing, parsing development in a head-final language, and the place of comprehension in a theory of language acquisition.

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“…With pictures instead of orthographic probes, a similar study (McKee, Nicol, & McDaniel, 1993) examined binding in adults and in TD children (4;1-6;4). The stimuli were triplets of sentences that differed only in whether the embedded object was a pronoun, a reflexive, or a referential NP (e.g., The alligator knows that the leopard with the green eyes is patting him/himself/the boy on the head with a soft pillow).…”

Section: Online Studies Of Bindingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Binding Relations in Specific Language Impairment

Schwartz

Hestvik

Seiger-Gardner

et al. 2016

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: This sentence processing experiment examined the abilities of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical language development (TD) to establish relations between pronouns or reflexives and their antecedents in real time. Method: Twenty-two children with SLI and 24 age-matched children with TD (7;3-10;11 [years;months]) participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment to determine whether they selectively activated the correct referent at the pronoun or reflexive in sentences. Triplets of auditory sentences, identical except for the presence of a pronoun, a reflexive, or a noun phrase along with a picture probe were used.Results: The children with TD were slightly more accurate in their animacy judgments of pictures, but the groups exhibited the same reaction time (RT) pattern. Both groups were slower for sentences with pronouns than with reflexives or noun phrases. The children with SLI had longer RTs than their peers with TD. Conclusions: Children with SLI activated only the appropriate antecedent at the pronoun or reflexive, reflecting intact core knowledge of binding as was true for their TD peers. The overall slower RT for children with SLI suggests that any deficit may be the result of processing deficits, perhaps attributable to interference effects.

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Children's application of binding during sentence processing

Cited by 37 publications

References 19 publications

Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions in Children’s Sentence Processing

Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions in Children’s Sentence Processing

Learning to parse and its implications for language acquisition

Processing Binding Relations in Specific Language Impairment

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