title: Developmental changes in misinterpretation of garden-path wh-questions in French.
abstract: This study explores (mis)interpretation of biclausal wh-questions by French-speaking adults and children, aiming to investigate cross-linguistic differences in sentence revision mechanisms. Following previous work in Japanese the ambiguity of wh-questions was manipulated: In ambiguous questions, the fronted wh-phrase could be associated with the first, main-clause verb or the second, embedded-clause verb, while in garden-path questions, an inserted filled-gap prepositional phrase (PP) blocked main-clause attachment. Importantly, French differs from Japanese in that the filled gap arises after the first verb-that is, after the wh-phrase has been interpreted within the main clause. Two story-based comprehension experiments were conducted to probe the effect of word order on revision performance. Adults and children frequently provided main-clause interpretations of ambiguous questions. In filled-gap questions, children displayed relatively acute sensitivity to the filled-gap in wh-argument questions (Experiment 2), but not in wh-adjunct questions (Experiment 1); adults showed surprisingly low sensitivity to it, frequently misinterpreting adjunct and argument questions. Acceptability ratings (Experiment 3) showed that adults systematically prefer in situ questions over wh-fronting questions. We conclude that timing of the error signal influences revision, and that whereas French-speaking children prioritize syntactic cues, adults prioritize distributional information about the optionality of wh-fronting in French.
authors.affiliation: a Department Linguistik , Universität Potsdam , Potsdam , Germany.
authors.forename: Romy
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lassotta
authors.affiliation: b Department of Cognitive Science , Johns Hopkins University , Baltimore , MD , USA.
authors.forename: Akira
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Omaki
authors.affiliation: c Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique , Université de Genève , Geneva , Switzerland.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Franck
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Filled-gap dependency; Garden-path; Misinterpretation; Sentence revision; Wh-questions