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Children’s and Adults’ On-Line Processing of Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences during Reading
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, Vol 8, Iss 1, p e54141 (2013), PLoS ONE
- Publication Year :
- 2013
- Publisher :
- Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2013.
-
Abstract
- While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children’s syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults’ syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage’ in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such as, ‘I think I’ll wear the new skirt I bought tomorrow/yesterday. It’s really nice’ in which the attachment of an adverbial phrase was manipulated. Results showed that adults and children exhibited similar processing preferences, but that children were delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis. It is concluded that children and adults have the same sentence-parsing mechanism in place, but that it operates with a slightly different time course. In addition, the data support the hypothesis that the visual processing system develops at a different rate than the linguistic processing system in children.
- Subjects :
- Adverbial phrase
Time Factors
Eye Movements
lcsh:Medicine
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Visual processing
Cognition
Reading (process)
Human Performance
Psychology
Child
lcsh:Science
media_common
Psycholinguistics
Multidisciplinary
Grammar
05 social sciences
050301 education
Experimental Psychology
Linguistics
Semantics
Mental Health
Medicine
Structural Linguistics
Comprehension
Research Article
Adult
Adolescent
Deep linguistic processing
media_common.quotation_subject
050105 experimental psychology
Young Adult
Literacy
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Syntax
Analysis of Variance
Behavior
lcsh:R
Syntactic ambiguity
C800
Reading
Science Education
Developmental Psychology
lcsh:Q
0503 education
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 8
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLoS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....677e38d166f4c27bebcde3744a4e5ab2