Print exposure predicts pronoun comprehension strategies in children

Abstract

Language development requires children to learn how to understand ambiguous pronouns, as in Panda Bear is having lunch with Puppy. He wants a pepperoni slice. Adults tend to link he with Puppy, the prior grammatical subject, but young children either fail to exhibit this bias (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt & Trueswell, 2007) or do so more slowly than adults (Hartshorne et al., 2015a; Song & Fisher, 2005). In the current study, we test whether language exposure affects this bias in elementary-school-age children. Children listened to stories like the one above, and answered questions like “Who wants a pepperoni slice?” which reveal their pronoun interpretation. Individual variation in the rate of selecting the subject character correlated with measures of print exposure, such that children who read more are more likely to follow the subject bias. This is the first study to establish that print exposure affects spoken pronoun comprehension in children.

The Influence of Focus Marking on Pronoun Resolution in Dialogue Context

“…Collectively, this presents a complex picture for the role of memory and language, as well as attentional versus pronoun effects. However, it does provide support for our relatively straightforward prediction based on general literature for referential expressions, that variation in memory and language skills would predict children's ability to interpret the most plausible referent of the pronoun (Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998;Serratrice and De Cat, 2018;Arnold et al, 2019;Langlois and Arnold, 2020;Qi et al, 2020). Our adult data showed that prosodic focus marking is attended to during pronoun processing, and this is more likely for children who have more available processing resources (Kidd, 2013;Järvikivi et al, 2014;Hartshorne et al, 2015).…”

“…In the present study, not only did the presence of a subject it-cleft fail to enhance subject preference relative to prosody alone, but when the it-cleft was present, there was no difference compared to baseline subject preference (as indicated by the broad focus condition), though a subsidiary analysis showed that the (visibly smaller) subject preference in the subject focus-cleft present condition was not significantly different to the subject focus-cleft absent condition. The absence of a clear effect of subject clefts in children could be explained in various ways, including the relatively low frequency of clefts impacting their use as cues to pronoun referents ( Arnold, 2008 , Arnold et al, 2019 ), the fact that the first contented noun (subject) is not the very first constituent in the sentence, which could reduce the first mention advantage ( Kaiser, 2011 ) or the complex syntactic and pragmatic characteristics of clefts delaying their acquisition ( Paul, 1985 ; but see Aravind et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Nevertheless, future work with older children would afford more complex span tasks (e.g., Gathercole et al, 2004 ), to examine if predictability holds across the specific conditions reported by the present study. For that same purpose, additional measures of language knowledge that test language exposure ( Montag and MacDonald, 2015 ; Arnold et al, 2019 ) and grammatical knowledge could be included ( Language Reading Research Consortium, 2015 ). This is especially important because there has been a lack of consistent effects for the role of individual differences in the general domain of children’s sentence comprehension, with some positive findings ( Boyle et al, 2013 ; Blything et al, 2015 ; Qi et al, 2020 ), and others negative ( de Ruiter et al, 2018 , 2020 ).…”

“…To assess this latter point, we incorporated independent measures of children’s working memory and language ability. Starting from a simple framework, we adopt a suggestion regarding referential forms in general ( Niewland and Van Berkum, 2006 ; Serratrice and De Cat, 2018 ; Arnold et al, 2019 ; Langlois and Arnold, 2020 ; Qi et al, 2020 ), that strong memory and language skills should predict an ability to activate the most plausible referent (i.e., the interpretive preference displayed by adults). Therefore, if linguistic focus marking cues indeed modulate children’s subject and first mention preferences, any potential requirements to activate these cues and/or suppress less reliable cues should be more straightforward for high scorers in our working memory and vocabulary depth tasks.…”

Individual Differences in Print Exposure Predict Use of Implicit Causality in Pronoun Comprehension and Referential Prediction

“…A potential concern for the Semantic Inference account is that it does not offer an obvious explanation for why people with high print exposure tend to follow the subject bias more consistently in other experiments. Arnold et al (2018aArnold et al ( , 2019 found this pattern in structures like Ana was cleaning up with Liz. She…, and Langlois and Arnold (2020) found this pattern in sentences using transfer verbs (goal/source verbs).…”