The development of interactive parsing: The role of prosody and lexical biases in children’s (and adults’) sentence processing

Studies with adult listeners have demonstrated that prosody, lexical information and referential evidence all have rapid effects on the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences, lending support to highly interactive models of online interpretation. But young children in parallel studies often fail to use referential information and instead rely heavily on lexical constraints (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logrip, 1999; Snedeker & Trueswell, 2004). This pattern is consistent with either a modular parsing system driven by stored lexical information or an interactive system which has yet to acquire low-validity referential constraints. In two experiments, we used a spoken language eye-gaze paradigm to demonstrate that four to six-year old children, and adults, rapidly use prosody to interpret prepositional-phrase attachment ambiguities. When both lexical and prosodic cues are manipulated, they have independent (additive) effects on online interpretation. We conclude that young children, like adults, rapidly use multiple sources of information to resolve structural ambiguities.