{"id":4316,"date":"2018-11-01T17:08:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T21:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/?page_id=4316"},"modified":"2018-11-01T17:08:50","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T21:08:50","slug":"2018-friday-session-b-1615","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/program\/browse-abstracts-2018\/2018-friday-session-b-1615\/","title":{"rendered":"2018 Friday Session B 1615"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday, November 2, 2018<\/a> | Session B, Conference Auditorium | 4:15pm<\/p>\n

Preschoolers fail to revise their syntactic analysis, even when their initial interpretation is driven by prosodic cues<\/strong>
\nA. de Carvalho, J. Trueswell, A. Christophe<\/em><\/p>\n

Because the prosodic structure of sentences correlates with syntactic structure, listeners exploit\u00a0 prosodic boundaries to detect syntactic boundaries and constrain their parsing\u00a0 (e.g. de Carvalho et al., 2016). However, since not every syntactic boundary is marked prosodically, listeners\u2019 reliance on prosodic information to constrain parsing may be low, in comparison to more reliable cues, such as lexical content. Here we investigated how children\/adults interpret an ambiguous noun-verb homophone when prosodic structure and lexical content provide conflicting information.<\/p>\n

Homophones belonging to different syntactic categories were used to create temporary ambiguities (e.g., ferme<\/em>, meaning \u2018a farm\u2019 or \u2018to close\u2019 in French). Sentences began with prosody supporting one interpretation, but ended with lexical content supporting the opposite interpretation. Sentences were created by cross-splicing two sentences which featured the homophone as a verb (e.g. [la petite<\/em>]NP<\/sub> [ferme<\/em><\/strong>V<\/sub> la bo\u00eete<\/em>] \u2013 \u2018the little girl closes <\/strong>the box\u2019), and as a noun (e.g. [la petite <\/em>ferme<\/em><\/strong>N<\/sub>] [est jolie<\/em>] \u2013 \u2018the little farm <\/strong>is beautiful\u2019; brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Thus a Verb+Noun sentence was [la petite<\/em>]NP<\/sub> [ferme<\/em><\/strong>V<\/sub> [est<\/em>V<\/sub> jolie<\/em>]VP<\/sub> \u2013 where listeners first heard ([The\u00a0 little girl] [closes<\/strong>… ), and interpreted ferme <\/em>as a verb, then had to revise it, when only the noun interpretation was consistent with the last words \u2018is beautiful\u2019. In Experiment 1, 4-to-6-year-olds and adults listened to sentences while watching two images side-by-side: one illustrating the noun interpretation (e.g., a farm) and the other the verb interpretation (e.g., a girl closing something). Eye-gaze and pointing were recorded. Both adults and children initially looked toward the picture supported by sentence-initial prosody (Figs.1A-1B), but only adults switched to look at\/select the \u2018correct\u2019 picture upon hearing disambiguating lexical evidence. Children looked\/pointed at the picture consistent with their initial interpretation, supported by prosody (Fig.1B-1D). Experiment 2 asked (a) whether children would revise their initial interpretation if they repeated the sentence aloud before responding and (b) whether they would repeat the prosody they heard, or change it to accommodate the later-arriving lexical information. Children\u2019s repetitions reveal that they most often repeat the sentence \u2018as is\u2019 and choose the initial interpretation, but when they do revise, they tend to correct the prosody (Table1). In Exp. 3, children heard the sentences without seeing the pictures, then walked across the room to select one. Selection patterns were similar to Experiments 1 and 2 (Fig.2), suggesting that image presence doesn\u2019t play a role in children\u2019s inability to revise.<\/p>\n

Altogether, both adults and preschoolers rely heavily on the initial information provided by prosody to constrain their parsing, even in a situation where prosodic information is misleading. Contrary to adults, children do not recover from their initial commitment (even though they remember and repeat the whole sentence, even when visual information is delayed). This behavior replicates the so-called kindergarten-path effect (Trueswell et al., 1999): children give\u00a0 more\u00a0 weight to the information that arrives first, even though that information is prosodic, and supposedly less reliable than lexical content. These results suggest that prosody is not treated as an inferior source of information, to be ignored in case of conflict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Session B, Conference Auditorium | 4:15pm Preschoolers fail to revise their syntactic analysis, even when their initial interpretation is driven by prosodic cues A. de Carvalho, J. Trueswell, A. Christophe Because the prosodic structure of sentences correlates with syntactic structure, listeners exploit\u00a0 prosodic boundaries to detect syntactic boundaries and constrain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15277,"featured_media":0,"parent":4058,"menu_order":170,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15277"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4317,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4316\/revisions\/4317"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}