How do adults and children process referentially ambiguous pronouns?

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Referential ambiguity in language processing is a complex phenomenon.
• Understanding how children acquire and process ambiguous linguistic structures is crucial for developmental psychology.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate on-line processing of referentially ambiguous English pronouns in adults and children.
• To examine the developmental trajectory of implicit and explicit knowledge of pronoun ambiguity.

Main Methods:

• Two eye-tracking experiments involving adults and children (4-7 years old).
• Participants listened to sentences with ambiguous (him) or unambiguous (himself) pronouns and performed picture selection tasks.
• Behavioral data (responses, reaction times) and eye movements were recorded.

Main Results:

• Adults exhibited referential ambiguity with pronouns, evidenced by competition in eye movements between internal and external referents.
• Children preferred sentence-internal referents in off-line tasks but showed implicit awareness of ambiguity through eye movements.
• A dissociation between implicit (eye-tracking) and explicit (picture selection) knowledge was observed in children.

Conclusions:

• Adult pronoun processing involves competition for referents, unlike unambiguous reflexives.
• Children possess implicit understanding of referential ambiguity before explicit knowledge is evident.
• The findings support theories of a dissociation between implicit and explicit knowledge in cognitive development.