Developmental parsing and linguistic knowledge: Reexamining the role of cognitive control in the kindergarten path effect

Are prosodic effects on sentence comprehension dependent on age?

PURPOSE

to investigate prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in Brazilian Portuguese and to test two hypotheses relying on the notion of boundary strength: the absolute boundary hypothesis (ABH) and the relative boundary hypothesis (RBH). Manipulations of prosodic structure influence how listeners interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences. However, the role of prosody in spoken language comprehension of sentences has received limited attention in languages other than English, particularly from a developmental perspective.

METHODS

Twenty-three adults and 15 children participated in a computerized sentence comprehension task involving syntactically ambiguous sentences. Each sentence was recorded in eight different prosodic forms with acoustic manipulations of F0, duration and pause varying the boundary size to reflect predictions of the ABH and RBH.

RESULTS

Children and adults differed in how prosody influenced their syntactic processing and children were significantly slower than adults. Results indicated that interpretation of sentences varied according to their prosodic forms.

CONCLUSION

Neither the ABH or the RBH explained how children and adults who speak Brazilian Portuguese use prosodic boundaries to disambiguate sentences. There is evidence that the way prosodic boundaries influence disambiguation varies cross-linguistically.

Children's syntactic parsing and sentence comprehension with a degraded auditory signal

During sentence comprehension, young children anticipate syntactic structures using early-arriving words and have difficulties revising incorrect predictions using late-arriving words. However, nearly all work to date has focused on syntactic parsing in idealized speech environments, and little is known about how children's strategies for predicting and revising meanings are affected by signal degradation. This study compares comprehension of active and passive sentences in natural and vocoded speech. In a word-interpretation task, 5-year-olds inferred the meanings of novel words in sentences that (1) encouraged agent-first predictions (e.g., The blicket is eating the seal implies The blicket is the agent), (2) required revising predictions (e.g., The blicket is eaten by the seal implies The blicket is the theme), or (3) weakened predictions by placing familiar nouns in sentence-initial position (e.g., The seal is eating/eaten by the blicket). When novel words promoted agent-first predictions, children misinterpreted passives as actives, and errors increased with vocoded compared to natural speech. However, when familiar words were sentence-initial that weakened agent-first predictions, children accurately interpreted passives, with no signal-degradation effects. This demonstrates that signal quality interacts with interpretive processes during sentence comprehension, and the impacts of speech degradation are greatest when late-arriving information conflicts with predictions.

Who "it" is influences what "it" does: Discourse effects on children's syntactic parsing

Children often interpret first noun phrases (NP1s) as agents, which improves comprehension of actives but hinders passives. While children sometimes withhold the agent-first bias, the reasons remain unclear. The current study tests the hypothesis that children default to the agent-first bias as a "best guess" of role assignment when they face uncertainty about sentence properties. Thus, rather than always relying on early-arriving cues, children can attend to different sentence cues across communicative contexts. To test this account, we manipulated interpretive uncertainty by varying cues to the discourse status of initial arguments (referring to new vs. given entities) and measured interpretation accuracy for active (where the agent-first bias predicted verb morphology) and passive sentences (where the two conflicted). Across three experiments, we found that children relied on the agent-first bias more when new discourse entities were signaled by definite NP1s, reference to unmentioned entities, and novel words. This, in turn, led to higher accuracy for actives relative to passives. In contrast, when given entities were implied through pronoun NP1s, reference to mentioned entities, and known words, children avoided the agent-first bias and instead assigned roles using more reliable but later-arriving verb morphology. This led to similar comprehension accuracy across constructions. These findings suggest that children simultaneously interpret relations between sentences (e.g., discourse continuity) and within sentences (e.g., role assignment), such that commitments to the former can influence parsing cues for the latter.

Direct impact of cognitive control on sentence processing and comprehension

Incremental language processing means that listeners confront temporary ambiguity about how to structure the input, which can generate misinterpretations. In four "visual-world" experiments, we tested whether engaging cognitive control - which detects and resolves conflict - assists revision during comprehension. We recorded listeners' eye-movements and actions while following instructions that were ripe for misanalysis. In Experiments 1 and 3, sentences followed trials from a nonverbal conflict task that manipulated cognitive-control engagement, to test its impact on the ability to revise. To isolate conflict-driven effects of cognitive-control on comprehension, we manipulated attention in a non-conflict task in Experiments 2 and 4. We observed fewer comprehension errors, and earlier revision, when cognitive control (more than attention) was elicited on an immediately preceding trial. These results extend previous correlations between cognitive control and language processing by revealing the influence of domain-general cognitive-control engagement on the temporal unfolding of error-revision processes during language comprehension.

Referential context and executive functioning influence children's resolution of syntactic ambiguity

Classic studies reveal two striking differences between preschoolers and adults in online sentence comprehension. Adults (a) recruit referential context cues to guide syntactic parsing, interpreting an ambiguous phrase as a modifier if a modifier is needed to single out the intended referent among multiple options, and (b) use late-arriving information to recover from misinterpretation. Five-year-olds fail on both counts, appearing insensitive to the referential context and often failing to recover from parsing errors (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). But other findings suggest that 5-year-olds show delayed rather than absent sensitivity to the referential context, and that individual differences in executive functioning predict children's ability to recover from garden-path errors. In 2 experiments, we built on these findings, focusing on whether children recruit referential-context cues if given time to do so. Children heard temporarily ambiguous instructions (e.g., Put the frog on the pond into the tent), while we monitored their eye-gaze and actions. We used a slow speech rate, and manipulated referential context between rather than within subjects, to give children time to bring referential context cues into play. Across experiments, eye-movement and action analyses revealed emerging sensitivity to the referential context. Moreover, error rates and eye-movement patterns indicating failures to revise were predicted by individual differences in executive function (scores in Simon Says and Flanker tasks). These data suggest that children, like adults, use referential context information in syntactic processing under some circumstances; the findings are also consistent with a role for domain-general executive function in resolution of syntactic ambiguity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).