Davies, Catherine and Lingwood, Jamie and Ivanova, Bissera and Arunachalam, Sudha (2021) Three-year-olds' comprehension of contrastive and descriptive adjectives: Evidence for contrastive inference. Cognition, 212. p. 104707. ISSN 0010-0277
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Abstract
Combining information from adjectives with the nouns they modify is essential for comprehension. Previous research suggests that preschoolers do not always integrate adjectives and nouns, and may instead over-rely on
noun information when processing referring expressions (Fernald, Thorpe, & Marchman, 2010; Thorpe, Baumgartner, & Fernald, 2006). This disjointed processing has implications for pragmatics, apparently preventing under-fives from making contrastive inferences (Huang & Snedeker, 2013).
Using a novel experimental design that allows preschoolers time to demonstrate their abilities in adjectivenoun integration and in contrastive inference, two visual world experiments investigate how English-speaking three-year-olds (N = 73, Mage = 44 months) process size adjectives across syntactic (prenominal; postnominal) and pragmatic (descriptive; contrastive) contexts.
We show that preschoolers are able to integrate adjectives and nouns to resolve reference accurately by the end of the referring expression, in a variety of pragmatic and syntactic contexts and in the presence of multiple
distractors. We reveal for the first time that they can contrastively infer, given a slowed speed of presentation
and visually salient size contrasts. Our findings provide evidence for a continuity in the development of pragmatic
skills, which do not appear to be linked to children’s language proficiency or speed of processing.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information and Comments: | “NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Cognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Cognition, Vol 212, July 2021: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104707 |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology |
| Depositing User: | Jamie Lingwood |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jan 2023 16:05 |
| Last Modified: | 25 Jan 2023 16:05 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3751 |
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