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The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children.
J C Trueswell1, I Sekerina, N M Hill
1University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. trueswel@psych.upenn.edu
Cognition
|December 2, 1999
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Adults rapidly interpret language by integrating context and linguistic cues.
- Little is known about real-time language processing in children due to methodological limitations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how children process spoken language in real time.
- To compare children's and adults' ability to use contextual information during sentence interpretation.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a novel head-mounted eye-tracking system to monitor children's and adults' eye movements.
- Participants responded to spoken instructions, allowing for moment-by-moment analysis of language processing.
Main Results:
- Five-year-old children failed to use discourse principles to resolve syntactic ambiguities.
- Children demonstrated limited ability to revise initial interpretations, unlike adults.
- Adults integrated discourse constraints early and revised parsing commitments effectively.
Conclusions:
- Children's real-time language processing differs significantly from adults'.
- Young children may not coordinate multiple information sources as flexibly as adults during interpretation.
- Findings have implications for models of sentence processing and language acquisition.