"THE BACON" Not "the Bacon": How Children and Adults Understand Accented and Unaccented Noun Phrases

Autor/in	Arnold, Jennifer E.
Titel	"THE BACON" Not "the Bacon": How Children and Adults Understand Accented and Unaccented Noun Phrases
Quelle	In: Cognition, 108 (2008) 1, S.69-99 (31 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0010-0277
DOI	10.1016/j.cognition.2008.01.001
Schlagwörter	Nouns; Language Processing; Eye Movements; Adults; Young Children; Suprasegmentals; Context Effect; Bias; Age Differences + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Sprachverarbeitung; Augenbewegung; Frühe Kindheit; Age; Difference; Age difference; Altersunterschied
Abstract	Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4- and 5-year-old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., "the bacon") with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less accessible entities. Experiment 1 confirms that accenting is informative for adults, who show a bias toward previously-mentioned objects beginning 300 ms after the onset of unaccented nouns and pronouns. But contrary to findings in the literature, accented words produced no observable bias. In Experiment 2, 4 and 5 year olds were also biased toward previously-mentioned objects with unaccented nouns and pronouns. This builds on findings of limits on children's on-line reference comprehension [Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). "Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension." "Language and Cognitive Processes"], showing that children's interpretation of unaccented nouns and pronouns is constrained in contexts with one single highly accessible object. (Contains 7 figures and 8 tables.) (Author).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10