Antecedent priming at trace positions in children's sentence processing.
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.
Roberts
Leah
L
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK.
Marinis
Theodore
T
Felser
Claudia
C
Clahsen
Harald
H
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception