Who “it” is influences what “it” does: Discourse effects on children's syntactic parsing
Who “it” is influences what “it” does: Discourse effects on children's syntactic parsing
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“它”是谁影响“它”做什么：话语对儿童句法分析的影响
DOI：
10.1111/cogs.13076
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发表时间：
2022
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Ovans, Zoe
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Huang, Yi Ting;Ovans, Zoe
儿童经常将第一个名词短语 (NP1) 解释为施动者，这可以提高对主动语态的理解，但会阻碍被动语态的理解。虽然孩子们有时会保留代理人优先的偏见，但原因仍不清楚。当前的研究检验了这样一个假设：当孩子面临句子属性的不确定性时，他们默认将主体优先偏差作为角色分配的“最佳猜测”。因此，孩子们可以在不同的交流环境中关注不同的句子线索，而不是总是依赖提前到达的线索。为了测试这个解释，我们通过改变初始论点的话语状态的线索（指新的与给定的实体）来操纵解释的不确定性，并测量主动句（其中代理优先偏差预测动词形态）和被动句（其中两者冲突）的解释准确性。通过三个实验，我们发现，当新的话语实体由明确的 NP1、提及未提及的实体和新词发出信号时，孩子们更依赖主体优先偏差。反过来，这又导致主动元件相对于无源元件具有更高的准确性。相反，当给定的实体通过代词 NP1、提到的实体和已知单词来暗示时，孩子们避免了主体优先的偏见，而是使用更可靠但后来出现的动词形态来分配角色。这导致跨结构的理解准确性相似。这些发现表明，儿童同时解释句子之间的关系（例如，话语连续性）和句子内的关系（例如，角色分配），因此对前者的承诺可以影响后者的解析线索。
Children often interpret first noun phrases (NP1s) as agents, which improves comprehension of actives but hinders passives. While children sometimes withhold the agent‐first bias, the reasons remain unclear. The current study tests the hypothesis that children default to the agent‐first bias as a “best guess” of role assignment when they face uncertainty about sentence properties. Thus, rather than always relying on early‐arriving cues, children can attend to different sentence cues across communicative contexts. To test this account, we manipulated interpretive uncertainty by varying cues to the discourse status of initial arguments (referring to new vs. given entities) and measured interpretation accuracy for active (where the agent‐first bias predicted verb morphology) and passive sentences (where the two conflicted). Across three experiments, we found that children relied on the agent‐first bias more when new discourse entities were signaled by definite NP1s, reference to unmentioned entities, and novel words. This, in turn, led to higher accuracy for actives relative to passives. In contrast, when given entities were implied through pronoun NP1s, reference to mentioned entities, and known words, children avoided the agent‐first bias and instead assigned roles using more reliable but later‐arriving verb morphology. This led to similar comprehension accuracy across constructions. These findings suggest that children simultaneously interpret relations between sentences (e.g., discourse continuity) and within sentences (e.g., role assignment), such that commitments to the former can influence parsing cues for the latter.