The Role of Verification Strategies : in Semantic Ambiguity Resolution in Children and Adults

ISBN-13: 9783639164015 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 248 str.

Anastasia Conroy

Opis

This book investigates the contributions of theparser and extra-linguisticinformation in the selection of a finalinterpretation of scopally ambiguous strings,integrating data from both children and adults.Previous research has found an advantage for surfacescope interpretationsin adult sentence processing (Tunstall, 1998) and inchildren sinterpretive preferences (Musolino and Lidz, 2006).In light ofthese findings, we investigate the source of theadvantage for surface scope interpretations and thefactors that contributeto children s ultimate adherence to surface scopeinterpretations. In adults, we show that the sourceof the advantage for surface scope interpretationscannot be described by a parsing preference, but canbe described by theease of the verification strategy utilized for thesurface scope interpretation. In children, we suggestthat the non-adult-like interpretations observedderive from an initial parser bias for inverse scopeinterpretations, followed bya period in which children have adult-like parsers,but lack the the ability to integratediscourse information as a means to inform theprocess of ambiguity resolution.

O autorze

Anastasia Conroy received her PhD from the University of
Maryland, College Park, where she studied child language acquisition.