{"id":4478,"date":"2018-11-02T08:40:45","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T12:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/?page_id=4478"},"modified":"2018-11-02T10:46:48","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T14:46:48","slug":"2018-alternates-6740","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/program\/browse-abstracts-2018\/2018-alternates-6740\/","title":{"rendered":"2018 Alternates 6740"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/browse-abstracts-2018\/\">2018 Alternates<\/a> |\u00a0<span>Saturday, November 3, 2018 |\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/conference-info\/browse-abstracts-2018\/#satposters\">Poster Session II, Metcalf Small<\/a><span>\u00a0| 3:15pm<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Better to be reliable than early: Cognitive-control effects on developmental parsing<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>Z. Ovans, J. Novick, Y. Huang<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Children parse sentences incrementally, and this leads to errors when initial misanalyses conflict with later-arriving evidence. This occurs when verbs predict misinterpretations (e.g., \u201c<u>Put<\/u> the frog on the napkin <em>into the box<\/em>\u201d \u00e0 misinterpret PP1s as goals [1]) as well as when verbs revise misanalyses (e.g., \u201cThe dax is <u>chas<em>ed by<\/em><\/u> the monkey\u201d \u00e0 misinterpret NP1s as agents [2]). These challenges are often attributed to immature cognitive-control abilities, which are associated with with poor conflict resolution in non-linguistic [3] and linguistic tasks [4].<\/p>\n<p>However, cross-task correlations do not reveal <em>how <\/em>cognitive-control abilities are deployed in real time to influence syntactic parsing during development. Does cognitive-control engagement always enhance garden-path recovery [5]? Alternatively, are these effects mediated by reliance on reliable parsing cues? Having an agent-first bias offers an early cue to role assignment, but predicts incorrect roles for unaccusatives, perspective verbs, and passives. In contrast, verb- specific biases provide more reliable cues to meaning, but are often delayed in sentences like passives. Thus, if cognitive-control engagement enhances reliance on reliable parsing cues, it should increase garden-path errors when verbs are misleading prediction cues (i.e., \u201cPut\u201d sentences), but decrease errors they are accurate revision cues (i.e., passives).<\/p>\n<p>The current study manipulates cognitive-control engagement by interleaving Stroop (Congruent vs. Incongruent) and Sentence trials (Ambiguous vs. Unambiguous, Fig.1). Following prior work [5], Incongruent Stroop trials engage cognitive-control, and this impacts subsequent sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 examined verb-initial sentences, where correct-goal looks (e.g., box) after disambiguation indicated successful revision and incorrect- goal looks (e.g., napkin) indicated misinterpretation. For Unambiguous sentences, 5-year-olds (n=64) made more correct-goal looks following Incongruent- compared to Congruent-Stroop trials. In contrast, for Ambiguous sentences, they made <em>fewer <\/em>correct-goal looks following Incongruent- vs. Congruent-Stroop trials (Fig.2). This Stroop x Sentence interaction suggests that cognitive-control engagement promotes parsing via reliable cues (<em>p<\/em>&lt;.01): These results are consistent with engagement biasing attention to early-arriving verbs (e.g., \u201cPut\u201d syntactically demands a location), causing children to predict incorrect locations for Ambiguous sentences. Nevertheless, it is possible that Incongruent-Stroop trials depleted children\u2019s limited cognitive- control, hampering parsing of subsequent sentences.<\/p>\n<p>To address this possibility, Experiment 2 (n=32) examined how cognitive-control engagement affects parsing when verbs are revision cues in passives. Unlike Experiment 1, passives have <em>late-arriving <\/em>reliable verb cues, so successful interpretation will indicate reliance on the verb, even as a revision cue. After passive morphology, likely-theme looks indexed successful recovery from the agent-first bias while likely-agent looks indicated a failure to do so. Similar to Experiment 1, a Stroop x Sentence interaction emerged (<em>p<\/em>=.01). Here, children made less accurate looks for actives following Incongruent- compared to Congruent-Stroop trials. In contrast, passives yielded <em>more <\/em>accurate looks following Incongruent- compared to Congruent- Stroop trials. Together, these results suggest that cognitive-control engagement influences developmental parsing by increasing reliance on reliable cues. This improves revision when verbs are accurate but hinders revision when verbs lead children astray. Limited cognitive- control may facilitate acquisition of linguistic representations (e.g. argument structure) by pushing children to follow reliable cues that will, by definition, usually lead to correct interpretations.<\/p>\n<p>References<\/p>\n<p>[1] Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, &amp; Logrip, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. <em>Cognition. <\/em>[2] Huang, &amp; Arnold, (2016). Word learn- ing in linguistic context: Processing and memory effects. <em>Cognition<\/em>. [3] Diamond, Kirkham, &amp; Amso, (2002). Conditions under which young children can hold two rules in mind and inhibit a prepotent response. <em>Dev Psychol<\/em>. [4] Woodard, Pozzan, &amp; Trueswell, (2016). Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners. <em>J Exp Child Psychol<\/em>. [5] Hsu &amp; Novick, (2016) Dynamic engagement of cognitive control modulates recovery from misinterpretation during real-time language processing. <em>Psychol. Sci.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2018 Alternates |\u00a0Saturday, November 3, 2018 |\u00a0Poster Session II, Metcalf Small\u00a0| 3:15pm Better to be reliable than early: Cognitive-control effects on developmental parsing Z. Ovans, J. Novick, Y. Huang Children parse sentences incrementally, and this leads to errors when initial misanalyses conflict with later-arriving evidence. This occurs when verbs predict misinterpretations (e.g., \u201cPut the frog [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15277,"featured_media":0,"parent":4058,"menu_order":105,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4478"}],"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=4478"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4548,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4478\/revisions\/4548"}],"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=4478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}