Use of Referential Context in Children’s Language Processing

Adult language comprehension is rapid, incremental, and opportunistic—making use of multiple cues from both linguistic and extra-linguistic sources (MacDonald et al., 1994). In contrast, recent research on early parsing has demonstrated that while children readily use bottom-up lexical cues about the meanings of words, they typically fail to use top-down contextual cues from the referential scene (Trueswell et al., 1999). This study examines whether children also fail to use this kind of referential information to interpret scalar adjectives like big and tall. Using the eyetracking paradigm, five-year-olds were asked to “Point to the big coin”. We varied both the number of referents for the noun (1 or 2) and the polarity of the adjective. We found that children used the linguistic meaning of these terms to reliably differentiate the referents of big and small approximately 400 ms after adjective onset. Critically, children, like adults, were able to use referential contrast in interpreting scalar adjectives, looking to the Target more often in trials containing 2 referents than those with 1 referent from 600 ms after adjective onset. Altogether these results indicate that adjectives rapidly influence early reference resolution through both their meanings and their referential implications.