Developing the ability to resolve syntactic ambiguity
Abstract
This dissertation examines children's use of lexical and contextual information to resolve syntactic ambiguities. Previous research has found that adults can use scene information to guide ambiguity resolution on-line. For instance, if they hear a temporary ambiguity such as "Put the frog on the napkin into the box" in a one-frog scene, they assume that "on the napkin" refers to the destination; However, if there are two frogs in the scene they assume that "on the napkin" restricts which of the two frogs is being discussed. Experiments 1 and 2 employ an elicited production and comprehension task to find that 4-6 year old children fail to use this information source in on-line and off-line comprehension, although they are sensitive to the facts about the pragmatic requirements of restriction for the purpose of speech production. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 investigate children's use of discourse and lexical tendencies to resolve interpret ambiguous sentences. Results indicate that children are able to take advantage of the lexical tendencies of verbs as well as discourse-focus information (motivated by a question such as "Which frog did the chicken tickle?") to resolve PP-attachment ambiguities. Together these results support the conclusion that children's comprehension difficulties when presented with syntactic ambiguity are the result of information processing limitations rather than a lack of syntactic or pragmatic competence. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the ability to integrate contextual information into a discourse representation increases across development, while the ability to use within-language statistical information comes into play earlier.
Recommended Citation
Felicia Dawn Hurewitz,
"Developing the ability to resolve syntactic ambiguity"
(January 1, 2001).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3031673.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3031673
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