Children’s and adults’ use of fictional discourse and semantic knowledge for 
prediction in language processing

Lee, Ruth; Chambers, Craig G.; Huettig, Falk; Ganea, Patricia A.4

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0267297

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Children’s and adults’ use of fictional discourse and semantic knowledge for prediction in language processing

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Huettig, Falk
Psychology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Center for Language Studies, External Organizations;
The Cultural Brain, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Lee, R., Chambers, C. G., Huettig, F., & Ganea, P. A. (2022). Children’s and adults’ use of fictional discourse and semantic knowledge for prediction in language processing. PLoS One, 17(4): e0267297. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0267297.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000A-5609-C

Abstract

Using real-time eye-movement measures, we asked how a fantastical discourse context competes with stored representations of real-world events to influence the moment-by-moment interpretation of a story by 7-year-old children and adults. Seven-year-olds were less effective at bypassing stored real-world knowledge during real-time interpretation than adults. Our results suggest that children privilege stored semantic knowledge over situation-specific information presented in a fictional story context. We suggest that 7-year-olds’ canonical semantic and conceptual relations are sufficiently strongly rooted in statistical patterns in language that have consolidated over time that they overwhelm new and unexpected information even when the latter is fantastical and highly salient.