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Lexical and referential cues to sentence interpretation: an investigation of children's interpretations of ambiguous sentences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2005

EVAN KIDD  and
EDITH L. BAVIN
EVAN KIDD
Affiliation:
Max Planck Child Study Centre, University of Manchester
EDITH L. BAVIN
Affiliation:
La Trobe University
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Abstract

This paper reports on an investigation of children's (aged 3;5–9;8) comprehension of sentences containing ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachment. Results from a picture selection study (N=90) showed that children use verb semantics and preposition type to resolve the ambiguity, with older children also showing sensitivity to the definiteness of the object NP as a cue to interpretation. Study 2 investigated three- and five-year-old children's (N=47) ability to override an instrumental interpretation of ambiguous PPs in order to process attributes of the referential scene. The results showed that while five-year-olds are capable of incorporating aspects of the referential scene into their interpretations, three-year-olds are not as successful. Overall, the results suggest that children are attuned very early to the lexico-semantic co-occurrences that have been shown to aid ambiguity resolution in adults, but that more diffuse cues to interpretation are used only later in development.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , November 2005 , pp. 855 - 876
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award to the first author while a PhD student at La Trobe University, and a postdoctoral fellowship to the first author from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. We would like to thank Rosy Colville for help in testing for Study 2 and Keith Brown for doing the drawings for Study 1. Thanks also to Jesse Snedeker for helpful comments on the thesis on which some of this paper is based.