Wonnacott, E;
Joseph, HS;
Adelman, JS;
Nation, K;
(2016)
Is children's reading "good enough"? Links between online processing and comprehension as children read syntactically ambiguous sentences.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
, 69
(5)
pp. 855-879.
10.1080/17470218.2015.1011176.
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Abstract
We monitored 8- and 10-year-old children's eye movements as they read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity to obtain a detailed record of their online processing. Children showed the classic garden-path effect in online processing. Their reading was disrupted following disambiguation, relative to control sentences containing a comma to block the ambiguity, although the disruption occurred somewhat later than would be expected for mature readers. We also asked children questions to probe their comprehension of the syntactic ambiguity offline. They made more errors following ambiguous sentences than following control sentences, demonstrating that the initial incorrect parse of the garden-path sentence influenced offline comprehension. These findings are consistent with "good enough" processing effects seen in adults. While faster reading times and more regressions were generally associated with better comprehension, spending longer reading the question predicted comprehension success specifically in the ambiguous condition. This suggests that reading the question prompted children to reconstruct the sentence and engage in some form of processing, which in turn increased the likelihood of comprehension success. Older children were more sensitive to the syntactic function of commas, and, overall, they were faster and more accurate than younger children.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Is children's reading "good enough"? Links between online processing and comprehension as children read syntactically ambiguous sentences |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/17470218.2015.1011176 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1011176 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2016 The Experimental Psychology Society. All rights reserved. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, May 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ 10.1080/17470218.2015.1011176 |
| Keywords: | Children's sentence processing, Eye movements, Good enough sentence processing, Reading development, Reanalysis, Syntactic ambiguity, Garden-path Sentences, Lingering Misinterpretations, Lexical-biases, Wrap-up, Recovery, Representations, Plausibility, Constraints |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Language and Cognition |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1454893 |
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