ERIC Number: EJ850901
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007-Mar
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0090-6905
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions in Children's Sentence Processing
Roberts, Leah; Marinis, Theodore; Felser, Claudia; Clahsen, Harald
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, v36 n2 p175-188 Mar 2007
The present study examines whether children reactivate a moved constituent at its gap position and how children's more limited working memory span affects the way they process filler-gap dependencies. 46 5-7 year-old children and 54 adult controls participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment and underwent a standardized working memory test. The results revealed a statistically significant interaction between the participants' working memory span and antecedent reactivation: High-span children (n = 19) and high-span adults (n = 22) showed evidence of antecedent priming at the gap site, while for low-span children and adults, there was no such effect. The antecedent priming effect in the high-span participants indicates that in both children and adults, dislocated arguments access their antecedents at gap positions. The absence of an antecedent reactivation effect in the low-span participants could mean that these participants required more time to integrate the dislocated constituent and reactivated the filler later during the sentence.
Descriptors: Sentences, Short Term Memory, Cues, Language Processing, Children, Adults, Control Groups, Pictorial Stimuli, Tests, Psycholinguistics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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