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Similarity-Based Interference and the Acquisition of Adjunct Control.
Juliana Gerard1, Jeffrey Lidz2, Shalom Zuckerman3
1School of Communication and Media, Ulster University, Jordanstown, United Kingdom.
Frontiers in Psychology
|November 3, 2017
Summary
Preschoolers struggle with sentence interpretation due to similarity-based interference, not grammar errors. Processing sentence complexity, not grammatical rules, impacts children's understanding of adjunct control.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
Background:
- Children exhibit non-adultlike interpretation of adjunct control sentences.
- Previous studies focused on grammatical sources for children's errors.
- Extragrammatical factors remain underexplored in adjunct control acquisition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of extragrammatical factors in children's adjunct control errors.
- To determine if similarity-based interference affects sentence processing in young children.
- To explore the impact of antecedent-intervening noun phrase similarity on interpretation.
Main Methods:
- Two comprehension experiments were conducted.
- Participants included preschool-aged children.
- Similarity between antecedents and intervening noun phrases (gender, number marking) was manipulated.
Main Results:
- Error rates increased with higher similarity between antecedent and intervening noun phrases.
- Similarity in gender and number marking both contributed to increased errors.
- Findings suggest processing limitations rather than grammatical deficits.
Conclusions:
- Difficulties in adjunct control acquisition are partly explained by similarity-based interference.
- Sentence processing mechanisms, similar to those in adults, underlie these difficulties.
- Extragrammatical factors play a significant role in children's language acquisition.
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