The Influence of implicit causality verb bias on children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns
View/ Open
Kane dissertation.pdf (201.3Kb)
Date
2006Item status
Restricted AccessAuthor
Kane, Joanna
Metadata
Abstract
In this study a completion task and a comprehension task were carried out to
investigate the influence of implicit causality on children’s resolution of ambiguous
pronouns. The children in this study were aged 8 years and 10 months to 11 years and
7 months. Previous adult studies have shown that adults use implicit causality bias
encoded in the meaning of certain verbs to interpret sentences containing ambiguous
pronouns. For example, if a sentence has an NP1 bias verb such as phone then the
explanation given in the sentence that follows the connective because will typically
refer to the first noun phrase. On the other hand, if a sentence has an NP2 bias verb
such as thank then the explanation given in the sentence following the connective
because will usually refer to the second noun phrase. The aim of this study was to
ascertain whether children also use these implicit causality cues to comprehend
sentences. The results show that children appear to use the same cues as adults when
interpreting ambiguous pronouns in single sentences. Our results support the view that
the ability to use syntactic and semantic information is an early emerging property of
the comprehension system. Our results also suggest that certain verbs appear to cue
the participant to produce completions in a particular mode of explanation; empirical,
intentional or deductive.