Children's Processing of Ambiguous Sentences: A Study of Relative Clause Attachment

Abstract

In this study, we investigate children's and adults' relative clause attachment preferences in sentences such as The student photographed the fan of the actress who was looking happy. Twenty-nine 6-to 7-year-old monolingual English children and 37 adult native speakers of English participated both in an auditory questionnaire study and in an online, self-paced listening experiment. Whereas the adult group's attachment preferences were influenced by the type of preposition joining the 2 potential antecedent noun phrases (NPs) (of vs. with), children's online attachment preferences varied depending on their listening span: Children with a relatively high listening span showed a preference for NP1 attachment irrespective of the type of preposition involved, whereas the children with a low span showed a general tendency toward NP2 disambiguation. We argue that (i) when resolving modifier attachment ambiguities during online processing, children primarily rely on structural information and (ii) the observed differences between children and adults, as well as those found between the two span groups, reflect working memory differences rather than differences in the parser.

A Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analysis of Working Memory and Implicit Prosody in the Resolution of Adjunct Attachment Ambiguity

“…Recall that in the Swets et al study, working memory effects on attachment preferences were greatly reduced when the test sentences were displayed on two lines (and eliminated altogether in the Dutch speakers). By contrast, if working memory restrictions are the sole factor affecting on-line attachment preferences for sentences like (1a-c), then low-capacity readers should prefer the second noun over the first noun, with high-capacity readers showing the opposite preference (as in Felser et al 2003;Traxler 2007). …”

“…The first study looked at off-line and on-line parsing preferences in children whose working memory was assessed using the listening span test, an auditory variant of the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) sentence span test (Felser et al 2003). In sentences like (1a-c), adults (whose working memory capacity was not tested) had faster overall processing time when the relative clause attached to the first noun in the NP-complex than when it attached to the second noun.…”

“…A third recent study Traxler (2007) was conducted to determine whether the opposing findings in the Felser et al (2003) and Swets et al (2007) studies were the result of differences in the participants' ages or differences in measurement procedures between the two studies. Recall that Felser and colleagues' (2003) study used an on-line preference assessment with children.…”

Learning to parse and its implications for language acquisition

“…For instance, self-paced listening (SPL) is now being used by some researchers (e.g., Felser, Marinis & Clahsen, 2003), though it is in some ways limited. First, the SPL method requires speech to be spliced into unnatural units; second, the reaction-time measure that this method provides is often difficult to interpret as a direct reflection of processing load (see Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 2005, for some discussion).…”

Greater processing capacity leads to second language acquisition features

“…But we are a long way from having the tools we need to measure capacity in young learners. Adaptations of working memory capacity have been developed and used with child learners (see Felser et al 2003), but to my knowledge (and in my experience) such measures are not usable with children younger than five years. An effort to develop such measures is an imperative for language acquisition research.…”