Poster #107 - Interpretative Priming of Globally Ambiguous Sentences

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

A growing body of work has demonstrated that children, like adults, can be primed to produce sentences with a particular structure (e.g., Huttenlocher et al., 2004; Savage et al., 2006). These priming studies have focused on sentence structures with very similar meanings (e.g., active vs. passive, prepositional object vs. double object datives). It is unclear, however, whether a particular interpretation can be primed when a sentence is compatible with multiple meanings (i.e., it is globally ambiguous). For example, in the sentence in (1), the pipe cleaner could either be the instrument of pointing – i.e., the sheep uses it to point ([[points at the pig] [with the pipe cleaner]]) – or modify the description of the pig – i.e., the pig holds it ([points at [the pig with the pipe cleaner]]).

(1) The sheep points at the pig with the pipe cleaner.

Previous work demonstrated that children rely on verb biases to determine how to interpret these sentences (Snedeker & Trueswell, 2004). Verbs fall into 3 classes: instrument-biased, modifier-biased, and equi-biased. The current study examines whether children’s interpretation of sentences with equi-biased verbs can be primed by producing sentences with one of these interpretations.

The experiment consisted of a picture selection task that the child played with a puppet. The child and the puppet took turns describing a picture and selecting the matching picture from two options. For the production portion of the task, an ambiguous sentence like (1) described the pictures, but the image itself disambiguated its meaning. When it was the child’s turn to select the match, the choices depicted the two alternative interpretations of the target sentence (Fig1) and technically either answer was correct. Crucially, the child’s production could serve as an interpretative prime; if they produced a sentence with a particular interpretation, they may be primed to select that same interpretation when encountering another ambiguous sentence of the same type.

Children (N=24,mean=6;2,range=5;0-8;3) were randomly assigned to either produce instrument or modifier interpretations. Each trial (n=8) consisted of a pair of picture selections. First, the puppet selected a picture based on the child’s production, then the child selected based on the puppet’s production.

The instrument priming group was more likely to select the picture corresponding to the instrument interpretation than the modifier priming group (Fig2; β=0.82,p<0.01), and there was no correlation between age and interpretation (R=0.20,p>0.1). This suggests that interpretation can be primed by the production of a sentence with a similar interpretation.

However, if the verbs are equi-biased between the two interpretations, then selection of the instrument interpretation should approximate 50% even if priming is not successful. The children primed with the modifier interpretation select the instrument interpretation significantly more than 50% of the time (t=3.29,p<0.01), which suggests that they were inclined to select the instrument interpretation regardless of the prime sentences. Thus, the chosen verbs may not be as equi-biased for children as they are for adults. To examine this, an in-progress control experiment is testing children’s preferred interpretations when they are not primed.

Authors

• Emily Atkinson, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Sofia Johnson, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author