Is children's reading “good enough”? Links between online processing and comprehension as children read syntactically ambiguous sentences

Wonnacott, E., Joseph, H. S. S. L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4325-4628, Adelman, J. S. and Nation, K. (2016) Is children's reading “good enough”? Links between online processing and comprehension as children read syntactically ambiguous sentences. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69 (5). pp. 855-879. ISSN 1747-0218 doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1011176

Abstract/Summary

We monitored 8- and 10-year-old children’s eye movements as they read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity to obtain a detailed record of their online processing. Children showed the classic garden-path effect in online processing. Their reading was disrupted following disambiguation, relative to control sentences containing a comma to block the ambiguity, although the disruption occurred somewhat later than would be expected for mature readers. We also asked children questions to probe their comprehension of the syntactic ambiguity offline. They made more errors following ambiguous sentences than following control sentences, demonstrating that the initial incorrect parse of the garden-path sentence influenced offline comprehension. These findings are consistent with “good enough” processing effects seen in adults. While faster reading times and more regressions were generally associated with better comprehension, spending longer reading the question predicted comprehension success specifically in the ambiguous condition. This suggests that reading the question prompted children to reconstruct the sentence and engage in some form of processing, which in turn increased the likelihood of comprehension success. Older children were more sensitive to the syntactic function of commas, and, overall, they were faster and more accurate than younger children.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/43398
Identification Number/DOI	10.1080/17470218.2015.1011176
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Institute of Education > Language and Literacy in Education
Publisher	Taylor & Francis
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