What hinders child semantic computation: children's universal quantification and the development of cognitive control

Minai, Utako; Jincho, Nobuyuki; Yamane, Naoto; Mazuka, Reiko

doi:10.1017/s0305000911000316

Cited by 22 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…We argue that children acquire linguistic knowledge of scrambling by around age 4, but that there may be some developmental factors that hinder children's successful use of this knowledge. Our findings not only fit very well with a recent trend in child language research that points to extra-linguistic factors blocking children's use of already-acquired linguistic knowledge (e.g., Mazuka et al 2009;Minai et al 2012), they also underscore the importance of teasing apart first language acquisition in terms of the possession of linguistic knowledge and child language processing in terms of the utilization of linguistic knowledge in the actual computation of linguistic meaning. In addition, the current study elucidates another specific domain in which phonology/prosody interacts with syntax in child language; children are able to incorporate prosodic information into their interpretation, in order to improve their comprehension of syntactically complex sentences.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

Acquisition and Use of Linguistic Knowledge: Scrambling in Child Japanese as a Test Case

Minai

Isobe

Okabe

2015

J Psycholinguist Res

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The current study investigates preschool-age children's comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g., Hayashibe in Descr Appl Linguist 8:1-18, 1975; Sano in Descr Appl Linguist 10:213-233, 1977; Suzuki in Jpn J Educ Psychol 25(3):56-61, 1977), children are able to interpret scrambled sentences in an adult-like way when the pragmatics is enriched in the experiments (Otsu in Acquisition studies in generative grammar, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 253-264, 1994). These findings suggest that children's difficulty in comprehending scrambling may be due to processing difficulties (Suzuki in J Psycholinguist Res 42(2), 119-137, 2013), such as the Lexical-ordering Strategy bias (Bever in Cognition and language development, Wiley, New York, pp 279-352, 1970), rather than their lack of the linguistic knowledge of scrambling. The current study revealed that children are indeed able to utilize prosodic information to interpret scrambled sentences in an adult-like way. Our findings provide converging evidence in favor of the proposal that children's grammatical knowledge of scrambling is intact, although they are more vulnerable than adults to processing difficulties that hinder their ability to successfully interpret scrambled sentences.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

Acquisition and Use of Linguistic Knowledge: Scrambling in Child Japanese as a Test Case

Minai

Isobe

Okabe

2015

J Psycholinguist Res

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“…", they point at the solo bicycle, and say something like "Not that bicycle", i.e., they show 'Exhaustive Pairing' under an extra object condition. This phenomenon has been attested in dozens of experiments among speakers of English (Bucci 1978;Philip 1995;Brooks & Braine 1996;Crain et al 1996;Roeper et al 2011), Dutch (Philip & Coopmans 1995;Drozd & van Loosbroek 1999;Hollebrandse 2004;Hollebrandse & Smits 2005;Philip 2011), Turkish (Freeman & Stedmon 1986), Russian (Sekerina & Sauermann 2015), Hungarian (Gyuris 1996), Korean (Kang 1999), Japanese (O'Grady et al 2010;Minai et al 2012), Norwegian, Spanish, and French (Philip 2011), etc. It has been found to be most common among preschoolers, but it has also been attested among older children (Philip 2011), as well as English adults and adult speakers of heritage Russian (Brooks & Sekerina 2005Sekerina & Sauermann 2015).…”

Section: The Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 84%

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

Kiss

Zétényi

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper calls attention to a methodological problem of acquisition experiments. It shows that the economy of the stimulus employed in child language experiments may lend an increased ostensive effect to the message communicated to the child. Thus, when the visual stimulus in a sentence-picture matching task is a minimal model abstracting away from the details of the situation, children often regard all the elements of the stimulus as ostensive clues to be represented in the corresponding sentence. The use of such minimal stimuli is mistaken when the experiment aims to test whether or not a certain element of the stimulus is relevant for the linguistic representation or interpretation. The paper illustrates this point by an experiment involving quantifier spreading. It is claimed that children find a universally quantified sentence like Every girl is riding a bicycle to be a false description of a picture showing three girls riding bicycles and a solo bicycle because they are misled to believe that all the elements in the visual stimulus are relevant, hence all of them are to be represented by the corresponding linguistic description. When the iconic drawings were replaced by photos taken in a natural environment rich in accidental details, the occurrence of quantifier spreading was radically reduced. It is shown that an extra object in the visual stimulus can lead to the rejection of the sentence also in the case of sentences involving no quantification, which gives further support to the claim that the source of the problem is not (or not only) the grammatical or cognitive difficulty of quantification but the unintended ostensive effect of the extra object.

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“…The fact that the act-out task may mask q-spreading emphasizes the necessity to investigate the role that visual context (i.e., pictures) plays in a novel way. Minai and colleagues (Minai et al 2012) did just that by employing the Visual World Paradigm (VWP;Trueswell & Tanenhaus 2004) to study what eye movements of Japanese-speaking children tell us of how they process quantified sentences in the presence of a visual context with partial one-to-one correspondence between two entities. They argue that the relative salience of extra objects in the pictures imposes perceptual restrictions on the domain of application of quantifiers, and children's attention is attracted to them ultimately leading to q-spreading errors.…”

Section: Theoretical Accounts Of Q-spreading Errorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are two important issues that weaken the conclusions of Minai et al (2012). First, they employed the between-participants design (control vs. target group) and then divided 29 children in the control group into 5 who made a few q-spreading errors (0.75 accuracy) and 24 who made many q-spreading errors (0.02 accuracy) (Table 2: 933).…”

Section: Theoretical Accounts Of Q-spreading Errorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The current study strives to overcome the shortcomings of Minai et al (2012) by contrasting eye movements of Russian-speaking adults and 5-to-6-year-old children who are adult-like, i.e., non-spreaders (N = 12), and who are not, i.e., q-spreading children (N = 19). We employed the standard sentence-picture verification task coupled with the VWP and paired the same spoken quantified sentence with two types of pictures: a control picture (alligators and bathtubs in exact one-to-one correspondence plus two distractor elephants: Figure 1A) or an experimental picture (alligators and bathtubs in partial oneto-one correspondence with two extra empty bathtubs: Figure 1B).…”

Section: Purpose and Predictions Of The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantifier spreading in child eye movements: A case of the Russian quantifier <i>kazhdyj</i> ‘every'

Sekerina

Sauermann

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9-10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children's difficulties in restricting the domain of a universal quantifier to the appropriate noun phrase and are referred in the literature as quantifier-spreading (q-spreading). We adapted the task to be performed in conjunction with eye-movement recordings using the Visual World Paradigm. Russian-speaking 5-to-6-year-old children (N = 31) listened to sentences like Kazhdyj alligator lezhit v vanne 'Every alligator is lying in a bathtub' and viewed pictures with three alligators, each in a bathtub, and two extra empty bathtubs. Non-spreader children (N = 12) were adult-like in their accuracy whereas q-spreading ones (N = 19) were only 43% correct in interpreting such sentences compared to the control sentences. Eye movements of q-spreading children revealed that more looks to the extra containers (two empty bathtubs) correlated with higher error rates reflecting the processing pattern of q-spreading. In contrast, more looks to the distractors in control sentences did not lead to errors in interpretation. We argue that q-spreading errors are caused by interference from the extra entities in the visual context, and our results support the processing difficulty account of acquisition of quantification. Interference results in cognitive overload as children have to integrate multiple sources of information, i.e., visual context with salient extra entities and the spoken sentence in which these entities are mentioned in real-time processing.

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What hinders child semantic computation: children's universal quantification and the development of cognitive control

Cited by 22 publications

References 24 publications

Acquisition and Use of Linguistic Knowledge: Scrambling in Child Japanese as a Test Case

Acquisition and Use of Linguistic Knowledge: Scrambling in Child Japanese as a Test Case

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

Quantifier spreading in child eye movements: A case of the Russian quantifier <i>kazhdyj</i> ‘every'

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