Referential and Syntactic Processes: What Develops?

Trueswell, John C.; Papafragou, Anna; Choi, Youngon

doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262015127.003.0004

Cited by 17 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…For instance, adult speakers are known to use a wide-range of speaker and addressee knowledge to tailor their referential descriptions, often based on the current discourse, in ways that make them appear to be under- or over-informative in their descriptions of visually co-present objects (e.g., adult speakers are likely to utter sentences like “Give me the square” in the presence of multiple squares if they believe that the listener knows which square is relevant, Brown-Schmidt, Campana, & Tanenhaus, 2002). Given these facts, children might simply fail to compute their interlocutor’s referential domain and assume that their own referential domain is the same as their interlocutor’s (i.e., they might think that “the frog” their interlocutor is referring to is the frog that they are currently looking at; see Trueswell, et al, 2011). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, it is also possible that children’s inability to revise in the “put” task is related to their linguistic understanding of the definite determiner “the” (see, Trueswell, Papafragou & Choi, 2011; Wexler, 2011). This is because, in the “put” task, children typically perform quite poorly in response to temporarily ambiguous sentences even when they are presented in referentially supportive contexts that are known to help adults arrive at the correct interpretation more quickly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Woodard

Pozzan

Trueswell

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Children as old as five to six years of age display selective difficulties revising initial interpretive commitments, as indicated by both online and offline measures of sentence comprehension (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logrip, 1999). It is likely though that individual children differ in how well they can recover from misinterpretations and at the age they become adult-like in these abilities. To better understand the cognitive functions that support sentence processing and revision, the present work investigates how individual differences in children’s ability to interpret temporarily ambiguous sentences relate to individual differences in other linguistic and domain-general cognitive abilities. Children were tested over two days on a battery of executive function, working memory, and language comprehension tasks. Performance on these tasks was then used to predict online and offline measures of children’s ability to revise initial misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous sentences. We found two measures of children’s cognitive flexibility to be related to their ambiguity resolution abilities. These results provide converging evidence for the hypothesis that the ability to revise initial interpretative commitments is supported by domain-general executive function (EF) abilities (Novick, Trueswell & Thompson-Schill, 2005), which are highly variable and not fully developed in children (Anderson 2002; Davidson, Amso, Anderson & Diamond, 2006).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Woodard

Pozzan

Trueswell

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…Our findings suggest an interesting extension of this proposal—that toddlers' knowledge of function words might help them identify links between constituents via the predictive dependency between their morphosyntactic features. Just as syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children use regularities in the number and type of arguments to identify verbs and infer their meanings (Fisher, Gertner, Scott, & Yuan, 2010; Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005; Trueswell, Papafragou, & Choi, 2011), children might use the predictive dependency between an agreeing verb and properties of one of its arguments to identify diverse subject noun phrases as bearing the same syntactic relationship to the verb, regardless of variation in their sentence positions or their semantic roles.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where are the cookies? Two- and three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns

Lukyanenko

Fisher

2016

Cognition

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We tested toddlers’ and adults’ predictive use of English subject-verb agreement. Participants saw pairs of pictures differing in number and kind (e.g., one apple, two cookies), and heard sentences with a target noun naming one of the pictures. The target noun was the subject of a preceding agreeing verb in informative trials (e.g., Where are the good cookies?), but not in uninformative trials (Do you see the good cookies?). In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds and adults were faster and more likely to shift their gaze from distractor to target upon hearing an informative agreeing verb. In Experiment 2, 2.5-year-olds were faster to shift their gaze from distractor to target in response to the noun in informative trials, and were more likely to be fixating the target already at noun onset. Thus, toddlers used agreeing verbs to predict number features of an upcoming noun. These data provide strong new evidence for the broad scope of predictive processing in online language comprehension.

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“…If children have not fully learned the specific link between the alternative interpretation and the prosodic cues, they may be forced to rely on the verb biases that they are familiar with. In some general models of sentence processing, certain cues such as syntactic information (e.g., Frazier and Fodor 1978) or lexical information (Trueswell et al. forthcoming) are considered to play a privileged role.…”

Section: Language Development and Executive Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of Executive Control and Language Processing

Mazuka

Jincho

Oishi

2009

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Research in executive function development has shown that children have poor control of inhibition functions, including the inhibition of prepotent responses, control of attention, and flexibility at rule‐shifting. To date, links between the development of executive function and children's language development have not been investigated explicitly. Yet, recent studies on children's sentence processing report that children tend to perseverate during sentence processing. We argue that such perseveration may be due to immature executive function.

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Referential and Syntactic Processes: What Develops?

Cited by 17 publications

References 41 publications

Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Where are the cookies? Two- and three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns

Development of Executive Control and Language Processing

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