The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children

TLDR

A great deal of psycholinguistic research has focused on how adults interpret language in real time, revealing a complex and interactive processing system that rapidly coordinates linguistic properties with contextual information, yet little is known about how children process language in real time due to methodological limitations. In the study of language acquisition, surprisingly little is known about how children process language in real time and whether they coordinate multiple sources of information during interpretation. The study used a head‑mounted eye‑tracking system to monitor children’s eye movements while they responded to spoken instructions, enabling real‑time analysis of language processing. The results showed that five‑year‑olds did not use discourse/pragmatic principles to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities and could not revise initial parsing commitments, whereas adults were sensitive to these constraints early and could revise incorrect parsing, highlighting implications for current sentence‑processing models.

Abstract

A great deal of psycholinguistic research has focused on the question of how adults interpret language in real time. This work has revealed a complex and interactive language processing system capable of rapidly coordinating linguistic properties of the message with information from the context or situation (e.g. Altmann and Steedman, 1988, Britt, 1994, Tanenhaus et al., 1995, Trueswell and Tanenhaus, 1991). In the study of language acquisition, however, surprisingly little is known about how children process language in real time and whether they coordinate multiple sources of information during interpretation. The lack of child research is due in part to the fact that most existing techniques for studying language processing have relied upon the skill of reading, an ability that young children do not have or are only beginning to acquire. We present here results from a new method for studying children's moment-by-moment language processing abilities, in which a head-mounted eye-tracking system was used to monitor eye movements as participants responded to spoken instructions. The results revealed systematic differences in how children and adults process spoken language: Five Year Olds did not take into account relevant discourse/pragmatic principles when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities, and showed little or no ability to revise initial parsing commitments. Adults showed sensitivity to these discourse constraints at the earliest possible stages of processing, and were capable of revising incorrect parsing commitments. Implications for current models of sentence processing are discussed.