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Children have considerable difficulty producing informative and unambiguous referring expressions, a fact that still lacks a full explanation. Potential insight can come from psycholinguistic models of ambiguity avoidance in adults, which suggest that, before describing any scene, speakers pro-actively monitor for some — but not all — types of potential ambiguity, and then subsequently monitor whether their just-produced expression provides an ambiguous description. Our experiments used eye tracking to assess the developing roles of these skills in children’s referential communication. Experiment 1 shows that adults’ eye movements can index the processes of both pro-active and self-monitoring. Experiments 2 and 3 show that children (n = 110) typically do not pro-actively monitor for potential ambiguity, although they do show evidence of pro-active monitoring on the occasions when they produce informative expressions. However, we do find evidence that children consistently monitor their own descriptions for ambiguity, even though they rarely correct their utterances. We propose that the process of self-monitoring might act as a learning signal, that guides children as they acquire the ability to monitor pro-actively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Words like church are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another view, readers retrieve one or more specific senses. In a reading task, context that was neutral or biased towards a particular sense preceded a polysemous word. Disambiguating material consistent with only one sense followed, in a second sentence (Experiment 1) or the same sentence (Experiments 2 and 3). Reading the disambiguating material was faster when it was consistent with that context, and dominant senses were committed to more strongly than subordinate senses. Critically, following neutral context, the continuation was read more quickly when it selected the dominant sense, and the degree of sense dominance partially explained the reading time advantage. Similarity of the senses also affected reading times. Across experiments, we found that sense selection may not be completed immediately following a polysemous word but is completed at a sentence boundary. Overall, the results suggest that readers select an individual sense when reading a polysemous word, rather than a core meaning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Psycholinguistic investigations of reanalysis phenomena have typically focused on revisions of phrase structure. Here, we identify a further subcomponent of syntactic reanalysis, namely the revision of case marking. This aspect of reanalysis was isolated by examining German subject-object ambiguities that require a revision towards a dative-initial order. Since dative-initial orders are potentially unmarked, no phrase structure corrections are required, but the original, preference-based nominative assignment must be revised. Experiment 1, an ERP study, revealed an N400 component for reanalysis of case marking, which contrasted with a P600 component for phrase structure revisions. The 're-analysis N400' was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that direct lexical support for a dative-initial order leads to a reduction of the effect. Finally, in Experiment 3, direct time course measures provided by the speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure supported the case reanalysis account by showing that conditions hypothesized to involve case reanalysis (dative-initial structures) require longer computation times than their nominative-initial counterparts. Lexeme-specific support for the dative-initial reading, however, does not lead to a faster computation of the target structure, but rather increases the likelihood that the correct interpretation will be computed. We interpret these findings as evidence for the general availability of an unmarked dative-nominative word order in German, the accessibility of which may be increased by lexical information. Moreover, the data show that syntactic reanalysis is not a homogeneous process, but may rather be subdivided along several dimensions that interact in determining overall garden path strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically compatible with only a proper subpart of the input are sometimes constructed, at least temporarily. Three self-paced reading experiments probed for interference from such locally coherent structures. The first tested for a distracting effect of irrelevant Subject–Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase–Verb Phrase sequences (e.g., The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee) on reading times. The second addressed the question of whether the interference effects can be treated as lexical interference, instead of involving the formation of locally coherent syntactic structures. The third replicated the reading time effects of the first two experiments with grammaticality judgments. We evaluate the dynamical account, comparing it to other approaches that also predict effects of local coherence, and arguing against accounts which rule out the formation of merely locally coherent structures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Examines the psychological factors that influence human language processors' preference for reanalysis during language comprehension using three experiments on complement-clause ambiguities. Revision-as-last-resort and revision-irrelevant hypotheses; Avoidance of reanalysis; Trimmed residual reading times with untrimmed raw reading times.

• Lingering misinterpretation and good enough processing have been widely examined. • Previous studies restricted to syntactic ambiguity (As Sue dressed the baby played). • We examined lingering misinterpretation of filler-gap dependencies. • We compared native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in five experiments. • Results show good enough processing is a general property of L1 and L2 comprehension. Research on temporarily ambiguous "garden-path" sentences (e.g., After Mary dressed the baby laughed) has shown that initially assigned misinterpretations linger after reanalysis of the temporarily ambiguous phrase in both native (L1) and non-native (L2) readers. L2 speakers have particular difficulty with reanalysis, but the source of this L1/L2 difference is debated. Furthermore, how lingering misinterpretation may influence other aspects of language processing has not been systematically examined. We report three offline and two online experiments investigating reanalysis and misinterpretation of filler-gap dependences (e.g., Elisa noticed the truck which the policeman watched the car from). Our results showed that L1 and L2 speakers are prone to lingering misinterpretation during dependency resolution. L1/L2 differences were observed such that L2 speakers had increased difficulty reanalysing some filler-gap dependencies, however this was dependent on how the dependency was disambiguated. These results are compatible with the "good-enough" approach to language processing, and suggest that L1/L2 differences are more likely when reanalysis is particularly difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]