Priming syntactic ambiguity resolution in children and adults

Naomi Havron (1) , Camila Scaff (1) , Maria Julia Carbajal (1) , Tal Linzen (2) , Axel Barrault (1, 3) , Anne Christophe (1)

1 LSCP - Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique
2 JHU - Johns Hopkins University
3 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

Adults use their recent experience to disambiguate ambiguous sentences: Structures that have recently been primed are favoured in the resolution of different types of ambiguity, an example of structural priming. Research on children's use of recent information for disambiguation is scarce. Using a forced-choice task with a tablet, we asked whether 5–6-year-old French-speaking children could also be primed in the resolution of attachment ambiguities, as well as whether listeners are affected by the proportion of primes of each structure, and whether priming is cumulative. We found that both children and adults can be primed, and are sensitive to the proportion of structures in the input, and that priming effects cumulate as the experiment progresses. This is the first study showing priming of ambiguous sentences at 5–6 years, suggesting that children, like adults, use recent experience as a source of disambiguating information.

Mots clés: Adaptation; Priming; Ambiguity; Language; Children

Domaines: Linguistique; Psychologie

Naomi Havron, Camila Scaff, Maria Julia Carbajal, Tal Linzen, Axel Barrault, et al.. Priming syntactic ambiguity resolution in children and adults. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2020, 35 (10), pp.1445-1455. ⟨10.1080/23273798.2020.1797130⟩. ⟨hal-03099573⟩