Abstract
Studies with adult listene
rs have demonstrated that prosody,
lexical information and referential
evidence all have rapid effect
s on the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences,
lending support to highly interactive models
of online interpretation. But young children in
parallel studies often fail to use referential information and instead rely heavily on lexical
constraints (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logr
ip, 1999; Snedeker & Trueswell, 2004). This
pattern is consistent with either a modular parsin
g system driven by stored lexical information or
an interactive system which has yet to acquire
low-validity referential constraints. In two
experiments, we used a spoken language eye-gaze pa
radigm to demonstrate that four to six-year
old children, and adults, rapidly use prosody to
interpret prepositional-phrase attachment
ambiguities. When both lexical and prosodic cu
es are manipulated, they have independent
(additive) effects on online inte
rpretation. We conclude that
young children, like adults, rapidly
use multiple sources of information to resolve structural ambiguities.
