One frog, two frog, red frog, blue frog: Factors affecting children's syntactic choices in production and comprehension

Two experiments are reported which examine children's ability to use refere ntial context when making syntactic choices in language production and comp rehension. In a recent on-line study of auditory comprehension. Trueswell S ekerina, Hill. and Logrip (1999) examined children's and adults' abilities to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities involving prepositional phrases( e.g.. "Put the frog on the napkin into..."). Although adults and older chil dren used the referential context to guide their initial analysis (pursuing a destination interpretation in a one-frog context and a modifier interpre tation in a two-frog context), 4 to 5-year olds' initial and ultimate analy sis was one of destination, regardless of context. The present studies exam ined whether these differences were attributable to the comprehension proce ss itself or to other sources, such as possible differences in how children perceive the scene and referential situation. In both experiments. childre n were given a language generation task designed to elicit and rest childre n's ability to refer to a member of a set through restrictive modification This task was immediately followed by the "put" comprehension task. The fin dings showed that, in response to a question about a member of a set (e.g., "Which frog went to Mrs. Squid's house?"), 4- to 5-year-olds frequently pr oduced a definite NP with a restrictive prepositional modifier (e.g.. "The one on the napkin "). These same children, however continued to misanalyze put instructions showing a strong avoidance of restrictive modification dur ing comprehension. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in the salience of the platforms that distinguished the two referents increased overall perfor mance, but still showed the strong asymmetry between production and compreh ension. Eye movements were also recorded in Experiment 2, revealing on-line parsing patterns similar to Trueswell et al.: an initial preference for a destination analysis and a failure to revise early referential commitments. These experiments indicate that child-adult differences in parsing prefere nces arise, in parr, from developmental changes in the comprehension proces s itself and not from a general insensitivity to referential properties of the scene. The findings are consistent with a probabilistic model for uncov ering the structure of the input during comprehension, in which more reliab le linguistic and discourse-related cues are learned first, followed by a g radually developing ability to take into account other more uncertain (or m ore difficult to learn) cues to structure.