Children's use of event representations in reference comprehension

Many referential terms are context-dependent, requiring listeners to consult the discourse context to determine who is being referred to. To determine reference, adults use linguistic heuristics, such as a bias to link pronouns with prior subjects (Arnold et al., 2000), and pragmatic reasoning based on their model of the situation. For instance, adults treat descriptions such as "the nephew" as unambiguous even in a two-nephew discourse context, if the story describes one nephew as having left the scene (Nieuwland et al., 2007). Children also recruit linguistic heuristics (e.g., grammatical position) to establish reference (Hartshorne, Nappa, & Snedeker, 2015; Song & Fisher, 2007). However, the evidence on pragmatic reasoning is less clear: While children use the semantic prominence of event participants to interpret pronouns (Kehler et al., 2011; Pykkonnen et al., 2010), it is difficult to tell whether this reflects a situation model or language statistics (Willits et al., 2015). In this dissertation, I ask what information sources and what mechanisms children use to resolve reference. In Experiment 1, I demonstrate, in a visual-world eye-tracking task, that 4-year-old children looked to the correct referent of an ambiguous noun phrase (the bunny in a two bunny discourse) before getting disambiguating information (with the crown) if one of the bunnies was described as leaving the scene earlier in the story (the bunny with the necklace left early). This provides new evidence that as children listen to a narrative, they determine reference using not only linguistic heuristics but also their model of the situation. In Experiments 2, 3 and 4, I demonstrate, using a passage completion task, that adults and 4- to 6-year-olds consider verb type and syntactic prominence when resolving reference for an ambiguous pronoun. Across these experiments I also provide evidence that adults, but not children, take into consideration grammatical aspect in pronoun interpretation. These results provide new evidence for early-developing effects of broad event category (i.e., verb type) on pronoun comprehension, and for two developmental changes: The subject-bias increased from childhood to adulthood, and aspectual markings of event structure did not affect children's pronoun interpretation. Finally, in Experiments 5, I explore patterns of coreference in naturalistic language input to provide specific hypotheses about which features of language may predict coreference.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Yuile, Amanda Rose

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fisher, Cynthia
• Baillargeon, Renee
• Federmeier, Kara D
• Willits, Jon
• Montag, Jessica

• Language Acquisition
• Reference
• Comprehension
• Event Representation
• Situation Model

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Amanda Rose Yuile

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117820

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F117820