International Centre for Language and Communicative Development: Discourse and Morpho-syntactic Effects on Children and Adult's Comprehension of Relative Clauses, 2014-2020

When listening to relative clauses (RC) children show anticipation for a subject (SRC) rather than object relative clause (ORC). Research has suggested that changes to discourse interfere with this SRC bias (Yang, Mo & Louwerse, 2012), however others have argued these findings were due to effects of lexical priming, rather than true discourse effects (Forster & Sicuro Corrêa, 2017). We investigated discourse effects on RC interpretation using ambiguous RCs and preamble sentences with no direct reference to the agents in the target sentence. For example, the target “The man saw the nurse [NP1] with the boy [NP2] who was very tired” was employed after one of these preambles: “It was a long day… (1) …at the hospital” [NP1-priming] (2) …at the school” [NP2-priming] (3) …that Tuesday” [Neutral] Forty-eight children (aged 4-6) and 30 adults saw pictures of NP1 and NP2 as they listened to the target sentence and their eye movements were monitored. We found no evidence of the preambles influencing online processing, and a strong bias for NP2 anticipation, suggesting that syntax guided the processing for children and adults while discourse did not. We later used unambiguous sentences with varying morphological cues (“The man saw the nurse(s) [NP1] with the boy(s) [NP2] who was/were very tired”) on adults and found that these cues influenced online interpretation with interference from syntax but not discourse.