ABSTRACT

Children’s sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous wh-questions like Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?, they preferentially associate the wh-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g., She explained at the campsite). This preferred association results in shorter syntactic dependencies compared to second verb associations (i.e., the embedded clause interpretation: She rode in the forest). Moreover, this bias toward shorter dependencies persists in “filled-gap” wh-questions, where the preferred interpretation is blocked by a prepositional phrase (e.g., Where did Annie explain at the campsite that she rode her horse?). Here, adults preferentially suppress their main clause bias and adopt embedded clause interpretations, whereas children still prefer their initial interpretations. The present study investigates how English-speaking children interpret ambiguous and filled-gap wh-questions. Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that children struggle to adopt second verb associations when first verb interpretations are unavailable. In five story-based experiments, we show that English-speaking children prefer main clause (first verb) interpretations in both wh-question conditions—although they seem to adopt more second verb associations than has been previously reported for children in other languages. We also document a novel repair strategy used by adults and children in which they describe who was at the main clause event rather than where it occurred. Taken together, our findings highlight the cross-linguistic stability of children’s shorter dependency biases and suggest that children’s abilities to inhibit preferred interpretations may be shaped by the development of language-specific syntactic knowledge.

摘要

儿童的句子解释通常缺乏灵活性。例如，当说法语的大人和小孩听到模棱两可的疑问时，例如安妮在哪里解释说她骑马了 ？，他们将优先关联WH与第一个动词用作不及物动词，并采用主句的解释（例如，她在露营地解释）。与第二个动词关联相比，这种优选的关联导致较短的句法依赖性（即，嵌入式从句解释：她骑在林中）。而且，这种偏向短依赖性坚持“填补缺口” WH-问题，首选的解释被介词短语所遮挡（例如，安妮在营地向何人解释说她骑马）？在这里，成年人优先压制他们的主要从句偏见，并采用嵌入的从句解释，而儿童仍然喜欢他们最初的解释。本研究调查了英语为母语的孩子们如何解释含糊不清，充满间隙WH-问题。跨语言证据表明，当无法获得第一个动词解释时，儿童会努力采用第二个动词联想。五故事为基础的实验中，我们证明了讲英语的孩子更喜欢主句（第一个动词）解释在这两个WH问题条件—尽管它们似乎比以前针对其他语言的儿童所采用的第二动词联想更多。我们还记录了成人和儿童使用的一种新颖的修复策略，其中他们描述了谁在主要子句事件中而不是在何处发生。综上所述，我们的发现突出了儿童较短的依从性偏见的跨语言稳定性，并表明儿童抑制偏好解释的能力可能会因语言专用句法知识的发展而受到影响。