Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logrip, 1999; Snedeker & Trueswell, 2004). This pattern is consistent with either a modular parsing system driven by stored lexical information or an interactive system which has yet to acquire low-validity referential constraints. In two experiments we explored whether children could use a third constraint-prosody-to resolve globally ambiguous prepositional-phrase attachments ("You can feel the frog with the feather"). Four to six years olds and adults were tested using the visual world paradigm. In both groups the fixation patterns were influenced by lexical cues by around 200ms after the onset of the critical PP-object noun ("feather"). In adults the prosody manipulation had an effect in this early time window. In children the effect of prosody was delayed by approximately 500 ms. The effects of lexical and prosodic cues were roughly additive: prosody influenced the interpretation of utterances with strong lexical cues and lexical information had an effect on utterances with strong prosodic cues. We conclude that young children, like adults, can rapidly use both of these information sources to resolve structural ambiguities.

中文翻译：

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韵律和词汇限制对幼儿（和成人）解析的影响


先前对幼儿歧义消解的研究发现，儿童严重依赖词汇信息，但在在线解析中始终无法使用指称约束（Trueswell、Sekerina、Hill & Logrip，1999；Snedeker & Trueswell，2004）。这种模式与由存储的词汇信息驱动的模块化解析系统或尚未获得低有效性引用约束的交互系统一致。在两个实验中，我们探讨了孩子们是否可以使用第三种约束（韵律）来解决全局模糊的介词短语附件（“你可以感觉到有羽毛的青蛙”）。使用视觉世界范式对四到六岁的儿童和成年人进行了测试。在关键的 PP 宾语名词（“羽毛”）出现后约 200 毫秒，两组的注视模式都受到词汇线索的影响。在成年人中，韵律操纵在这个早期时间窗口中产生了影响。在儿童中，韵律的效果延迟了大约 500 毫秒。词汇和韵律线索的影响大致是相加的：韵律影响具有强词汇线索的话语的解释，而词汇信息对具有强韵律线索的话语产生影响。我们的结论是，幼儿和成年人一样，可以快速使用这两种信息源来解决结构性歧义。