The influence of fantastical discourse context on young children's on-line sentence comprehension

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Children encounter many fantastical events in stories (e.g. Peter Pan takes off and flies). When preschoolers are asked explicit questions about how stories work, they show their understanding that events in fiction can contradict what they know about the way events happen in the real world. However, children's answers to explicit questions often differ significantly from their interpretation of events in real time. *******The general goal of this research program is to investigate children's moment-by-moment interpretations of language as a fantastical discourse unfolds. First, we will ask whether children rely upon events in fiction, rather than their real-world knowledge, when they listen to a story. We will present five-year-olds with stories featuring fantastical characters and improbable events (e.g. an elf who doesn't get around on a bicycle, but on a vacuum) and then show them images including a vacuum and a bicycle while they hear (e.g.) ‘Elliott the elf is riding the vacuum'. Once children hear ‘riding', will they look more at the bicycle – an object that often accompanies the word ‘ride', and the kind of object that people ride in the real world – or to the vacuum, drawing on the context from the story? In other words, will children rely on Elliott's unusual preference to anticipate the way that the final sentence will unfold? By manipulating story background, characters, and events, drawing the real and narrative worlds closer together or emphasizing their distance, we will discover which kinds of breaks with the real world influence children's ability to rely on a fantastical discourse in real time. Second, we are interested to know how the new fictional information influences children's later interpretations of language in a new context. Are the new (fantastical) semantic relationships – such as the pairing of ‘ride' and ‘vacuum' - quarantined and forgotten after a story is over, or do they inform children's expectations about upcoming language in new contexts (such as a different elf or an ordinary girl)? Third, we will explore the relationship between children's performance and certain other skills. It may be easier for children to suppress their day-to-day predictions about language, and instead use the story context, if their ability to inhibit learned responses is strong. Conversely, it may be more difficult for children who have a deep understanding of the way words are related to one another to override what they know and rely on the story to make predictions about upcoming language.******Our long term goal is to develop a comprehensive account of how language that contradicts children's learned knowledge of the real world is processed in real-time. By asking how children process language in a discourse context and discovering the cognitive and linguistic processes involved, we will enable the creation of more sensitive methods for assessing children's narrative comprehension.**