Abstract This research explores children’s ability to integrate contextual and linguistic cues. Prior work has shown that children are not able to weigh contextual information in an adult-like way and that between the age of 4 and 6 they show difficulties in revising a hypothesis they have made based on early-arriving linguistic information in sentence processing. Therefore we considered children’s ability to confirm or override a context-based hypothesis based on linguistic information. Our objective in this study was to test (1) children’s (ages 4–6) ability to form a hypothesis based on contextual information, (2) their ability to override such a hypothesis based on linguistic information and (3) how children are able to use different types of linguistic cues (morphosyntactic versus prosodic) to confirm or override the initial hypothesis. Results from both offline (pointing) and online (eye tracking) tasks suggest that children in this age group indeed form hypotheses based on contextual information. Age effects were found regarding children’s ability to override these hypotheses. Overall, 4-year-olds were not shown to be able to override their hypotheses using linguistic information of interest. For 5- and 6-year-olds, it depended on the types of linguistic cues that were available to them. Children were better at using morphosyntactic cues to override an initial hypothesis than they were at using prosodic cues to do so. Our results suggest that children slowly develop the ability to override hypotheses based on early-arriving information, even when that information is extralinguistic and contextual. Children must learn to weight different types of cues in an adult-like way. This developmental period of learning to prioritize different cues in an adult-like way is consistent with a constraint-based model of learning.

中文翻译：

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基于上下文假设的儿童对句法和韵律线索的处理：一项眼动追踪研究

摘要这项研究探讨了儿童整合上下文和语言提示的能力。先前的工作表明，儿童无法像成年人一样权衡上下文信息，并且在4岁至6岁之间，他们很难根据句子处理中早期到达的语言信息修改他们的假设。因此，我们考虑了儿童根据语言信息确认或推翻基于上下文的假设的能力。我们在这项研究中的目的是测试（1）儿童（4-6岁）基于上下文信息形成假设的能力，（2）他们基于语言信息来推翻这种假设的能力，以及（3）儿童的能力使用不同类型的语言提示（句法还是韵律）来确认或推翻最初的假设。离线（指向）和在线（眼睛跟踪）任务的结果表明，这个年龄段的孩子确实基于上下文信息形成了假设。发现了关于儿童推翻这些假设的能力的年龄影响。总体而言，未显示4岁儿童能够使用感兴趣的语言信息来推翻其假设。对于5岁和6岁的孩子，这取决于他们可以使用的语言提示的类型。与使用韵律提示相比，儿童更擅长使用形态句法提示来推翻初始假设。我们的结果表明，即使这些信息是语言外的和上下文的，孩子也会根据早期到达的信息逐渐发展出推翻假设的能力。儿童必须学会像成年人一样对不同类型的线索进行加权。