The Influence of Fantastical Discourse Context on Young Children's Online Sentence Comprehension

Real-time eye-movement measures were used to ask how a fantastical discourse context competes with stored representations of real-world events to influence moment-by-moment interpretation of a story by 7-year-old children and adults. Listeners heard stories about fantastical characters such as witches, who performed unusual actions such as eating keys. Results from Chapter 2 demonstrate that 7-year-olds were less effective at bypassing stored real-world knowledge during real-time interpretation than adults. Nevertheless, an effect of discourse context on comprehension was still apparent. In Chapter 3, the effect of generic language on children’s and adults’ performance was examined. Generic language implies a type of universal truth that applies to categories, and may therefore enhance the salience of fantastical information in listeners’ mental representations of story events. When stories referred either to the actions of an individual, using non-generic language (e.g., ‘Wendy the witch has keys for her lunch’) or used generic language to attribute these actions to a category (‘Witches have…’), adults used discourse-based information, whereas children relied on stored semantic knowledge during real-time comprehension regardless of language type. Contrary to expectation, children were less able to override their stored semantic knowledge when they heard generic than when they heard non-generic language. When stories referred to novel fantastical creatures about which listeners possessed no background information, children were able to integrate information from the discourse and generic language supported their performance, whereas adults’ performance degraded across both language types. I conclude that generic language is more supportive of children’s than of adults’ use of a fantastical discourse context during anticipatory language processing, and that children interpret unusual actions by familiar fantastical characters about whom they already possess background information as violations of their prior knowledge. I also examine the relation between listeners’ performance and individual variation in their cognitive skills.Ph.D.2019-11-19 00:00:0