THE BACON not the bacon: how children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4- and 5-year-old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., the bacon) with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less accessible entities. Experiment 1 confirms that accenting is informative for adults, who show a bias toward previously-mentioned objects beginning 300 ms after the onset of unaccented nouns and pronouns. But contrary to findings in the literature, accented words produced no observable bias. In Experiment 2, 4 and 5 year olds were also biased toward previously-mentioned objects with unaccented nouns and pronouns. This builds on findings of limits on children's on-line reference comprehension [Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes], showing that children's interpretation of unaccented nouns and pronouns is constrained in contexts with one single highly accessible object.

Figure 1

Sample visual display for Experiment 1.

Figure 2

Experiment 1 results: Proportion looks to target and competitor objects in the unaccented/anaphoric and pronominal conditions. The graph begins at the onset of the critical expression for each item. Proportions are calculated out of all looks, including track loss.

Figure 3

Experiment 1 results: proportion looks to the given (previously-mentioned) object out of all looks to both the given and new cohort objects. The vertical line represents the average offset of the target word. The graph begins at the onset of the critical expression. Proportions are calculated out of all looks, including trackloss.

Figure 4

Experiment 1: proportion looks to the target object in the four critical conditions. The vertical line represents the average offset of the target word. The graph begins at the onset of the critical expression. Proportions are calculated out of all looks, including trackloss.

Figure 5

Experiment 2 results: proportion looks to the target following unaccented/anaphoric and pronominal conditions. The vertical lines represent the average offset of the target word. The graph begins at the onset of the critical expression for each item. Proportions are calculated out of all looks, including trackloss.

Figure 6

Experiment 2 results: proportion looks to the target following unaccented (top panel) and accented nouns (bottom panel). The vertical line represents the average offset of the target word. The graph begins at the onset of the critical expression for each item. Proportions are calculated out of all looks, including trackloss.

Figure 7

Experiment 2: proportion looks to the target object in the four critical conditions. The vertical line represents the average offset of the target word. The graph begins at the onset of the critical expression. Proportions are calculated out of all looks, including trackloss.