The Role of Verification Strategies: in Semantic Ambiguity Resolution in Children and Adults

This book investigates the contributions of the parser and extra-linguistic information in the selection of a final interpretation of scopally ambiguous strings, integrating data from both children and adults. Previous research has found an advantage for surface scope interpretations in adult sentence processing (Tunstall, 1998) and in children?s interpretive preferences (Musolino and Lidz, 2006). In light of these findings, we investigate the source of the advantage for surface scope interpretations and the factors that contribute to children?s ultimate adherence to surface scope interpretations. In adults, we show that the source of the advantage for surface scope interpretations cannot be described by a parsing preference, but can be described by the ease of the verification strategy utilized for the surface scope interpretation. In children, we suggest that the non-adult-like interpretations observed derive from an initial parser bias for inverse scope interpretations, followed by a period in which children have adult-like parsers, but lack the the ability to integrate discourse information as a means to inform the process of ambiguity resolution.