2021/06/25 by Liam P. BLYTHING, Maialen IRAOLA AZPIROZ, Shanley ALLEN +2
paper · doi:10.1017/s0305000921000349
Abstract In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs ( küssen “to kiss”) in Experiment 1 (N = 72), or dative object-experiencer verbs ( gefallen “to like”) in Experiment 2 (N = 64). This was followed by the personal pronoun er or the demonstrative pronoun der . Interpretive preferences for er were most robust when high prominence cues (first mention, subject, proto-agent) were aligned onto the same entity; and the same applied to der for low prominence cues (second mention, object, proto-patient). These preferences were reduced in conditions where cues were misaligned, and there was evidence that each cue independently influenced performance. Crucially, individual variation in age predicted adult-like weighting preferences for semantic cues (Schumacher, Roberts & Järvikivi, 2017).