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

Abstract

Purpose To examine children’s comprehension of verb phrase (VP) ellipsis constructions in light of their automatic, online structural processing abilities and conscious, metalinguistic reflective skill. Method Forty-two children ages 5 through 12 years listened to VP ellipsis constructions involving the strict/sloppy ambiguity (e.g., “The janitor untangled himself from the rope and the fireman in the elementary school did too after the accident.”) in which the ellipsis phrase (“did too”) had 2 interpretations: (a) strict (“untangled the janitor”) and (b) sloppy (“untangled the fireman”). We examined these sentences at a normal speech rate with an online cross-modal picture priming task (n = 14) and an offline sentence–picture matching task (n = 11). Both tasks were also given with slowed speech input (n = 17). Results Children showed priming for both the strict and sloppy interpretations at a normal speech rate but only for the strict interpretation with slowed input. Offline, children displayed an adultlike preference for the sloppy interpretation with normal-rate input but a divergent pattern with slowed speech. Conclusions Our results suggest that children and adults rely on a hybrid syntax-discourse model for the online comprehension and offline interpretation of VP ellipsis constructions. This model incorporates a temporally sensitive syntactic process of VP reconstruction (disrupted with slow input) and a temporally protracted discourse effect attributed to parallelism (preserved with slow input).

The Real-Time Comprehension of Idioms by Typical Children, Children with Specific Language Impairment and Children with Autism

“…However, in follow-up analyses examining the effect of age on priming for each meaning separately (using the same regression approach described above, except that only relatedness, age, and their interaction were included as fixed effects), the priming effects did not change reliably as a function of age for either meaning (i.e., the interaction between Age and Relatedness was non-significant: Literal p=0.28; Idiomatic p=0.41), suggesting that this is not actually the case. Thus the results appear consistent with prior results of on-line processing developing in advance of off-line ability [ 16 – 19 ].…”

“…Similarly, adult-like formation of dependency links in real time has been demonstrated with other complex sentence constructions as well. In one study, a group of 4–6 year old children showed adult-like on-line comprehension of relative clause structures; [ 18 ]; in another, a group of 5–12 year olds showed adult-like on-line comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis constructions [ 19 ].…”

Verb gapping: An action-gap compatibility study

“…Though the issue as to the reconstruction mechanism is not yet settled, findings from studies on verb-phrase ellipsis and on sluicing, i.e. elision of an entire clause except for a wh-word (e.g., Humphrey ordered something but Spencer doesn't know what Humphrey ordered) converge in suggesting that the elided element is reconstructed in real time -immediately when or shortly after encountering the ellipsis (e.g., Callahan, Walenski, & Love, 2012;Poirier, Wolfinger, Spellman, & Shapiro, 2010;Shapiro & Hestvik, 1995;Shapiro, Hestvik, Lesan, & Garcis, 2003: Yoshida, Dickey, & Sturt, 2013.…”

La elipsis y el diálogo en la adquisición temprana de la sintaxis.

“…The vertical 'both' EPS construction found in these data, ensures the cohesion of early dialogues. The linguistic constructions of dialogue have been widely studied (Berko-Gleason & Ratner, 2009), both as part of early pragmatic development (for a review, see Bryant, 2009) and as a determining variable in the process of early language acquisition (Veneziano, 2010). Our results make specific this relationship for the Spanish language.…”