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ERIC Number: EJ876198
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-May
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0022-0965
EISSN: N/A
Children's (In)ability to Recover from Garden Paths in a Verb-Final Language: Evidence for Developing Control in Sentence Processing
Choi, Youngon; Trueswell, John C.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, v106 n1 p41-61 May 2010
An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong disambiguating evidence at the end of the sentence. These findings are notable for their striking similarities with findings from children parsing English; however, in those and other studies of English, children were found to be reluctant to use late-arriving syntactic evidence to override earlier verb-based cues to structure, whereas here Korean children were reluctant to use late-arriving verb-based cues to override earlier syntactic evidence. The findings implicate a general cross-linguistic pattern for parsing development in which late-developing cognitive control abilities mediate the recovery from so-called "garden path" sentences. Children's limited cognitive control prevents them from inhibiting misinterpretations even when the disambiguating evidence comes from highly informative verb information. (Contains 5 tables and 4 figures.)
Elsevier. 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, FL 32887-4800. Tel: 877-839-7126; Tel: 407-345-4020; Fax: 407-363-1354; e-mail: usjcs@elsevier.com; Web site: http://www.elsevier.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A