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

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Planck, Max
Copyright Year	2005
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 threeand 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. [*] 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. Address for correspondence : Evan Kidd, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. tel : +44 161 275 2594; fax : +44 161 275 8587; e-mail : evan.j.kidd@ manchester.ac.uk J. Child Lang. 32 (2005), 855–876. f 2005 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0305000905007051 Printed in the United Kingdom
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Language	English
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Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article