Development of the ability to perceive ambiguities: evidence for the task specificity of a linguistic skill

This study asked whether children's ability to perceive linguistic ambiguities was correlated with that of perceiving pictorial ambiguities. A total of 48 ambiguous sentences and 24 ambiguous pictures were selected for comprehensibility. Half the sentences and pictures were symbolic ambiguities (i.e., they contained symbols that stood for two different objects) and half were structural ambiguities (i.e., the structures of the sentences or pictures could be broken up two different ways). No significant correlations were found between the linguistic and pictorial modes. In both modes, correct performance on the symbolic ambiguities was better and was observed earlier than that for structural ambiguities. After taking into account certain methodological problems with nonsignificant correlations and ambiguous sentences, it was concluded that at least some nontrivial component of the linguistic ambiguity detector was task specific to language.