Children's on-line processing of epistemic modals

Abstract

In this paper we investigated the real-time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we monitored children's eye-movements while processing a sentence with modal expressions of different force (might/must). Children were also asked to judge the truth-value of the target sentences at the end of the reasoning task. Consistent with previous findings (Noveck, 2001), we found that children's behavioural responses were much less accurate compared to adults. Their eye-movements, however, revealed that children did not treat the two modal expressions alike. As soon as a modal expression was presented, children and adults showed a similar fixation pattern that varied as a function of the modal expression they heard. It is only at the very end of the sentence that children's fixations diverged from the adult ones. We discuss these findings in relation to the proposal that children narrow down the set of possible outcomes in undetermined reasoning scenarios and endorse only one possibility among several (Acredolo & Horobin, 1987, Ozturk & Papafragou, 2015).

The Interaction of Morphological Gender With Stereotypical Information: An Eye Tracking Study on Gender Inferences

“…The paper is structured as follows: in the next section we will briefly summarize existing literature and the different predictions stemming from two opposed accounts, the "Mental Model" and the "Minimalist Hypothesis". Then we will present the design and the results of a novel eye-tracking experiment based on the Visual World paradigm (Cooper, 1974;Tanenhaus et al, 1995;Moscati et al, 2017). Finally, we discuss how our results support the "Mental Model Hypothesis" and the view that gender inferences are automatically generated, unless blocked by disambiguating morphology, as in sentences like (2).…”

Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language

“…The visual world paradigm, compared with other psycholinguistic techniques, has several unique advantages. First, the visual world paradigm can be used in a wide of populations, including those who cannot read and/or who cannot overtly give their behavioral responses, such as preliterate children 40,41,42,43,44,45 , elderly adults 46 , and patients (e.g., aphasics)…”

Learning modals: A grammatical perspective

“…In one‐fourth of the world's languages (van der Auwera & Ammann, 2005), there are modals like English could or have to (1, 2), which can express both major flavour types 3 . This kind of modal meaning variability has long been recognized in the linguistic literature, likely as variable‐flavour modals are ubiquitous across Indo‐European languages (Jespersen, 1924; Palmer, 2001, i.a.). Variable‐flavour modals like English must or have to show syntactic differences depending on flavour.…”

“…Many different root flavours of modality exist (see Hacquard, 2011; Palmer, 2001), which may be expressed by the same modal (5a,b,c). Grammatical effects covarying with root sub‐flavour are less prominent than between the major root versus epistemic divide.…”

“…The syntactic categories and constructional strategies languages use to grammatically represent modal meanings vary widely (Hacquard, 2013; Palmer, 2001; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018; i.a.). Modals differ in morphosyntactic category within and across languages, with a useful distinction between functional (auxiliary and functional verbs) 9 and lexical modals (verbs, adverbs, adjectives and nouns; Hacquard, 2013; Traugott, 2006).…”