Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research Vol.55 710-725 June 2012. doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2011/10-0281)
© American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Supplemental Materials
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrowCustom Print
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow My Folders
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow reprints & permissions
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Callahan, S. M.
Right arrow Articles by Love, T.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Callahan, S. M.
Right arrow Articles by Love, T.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Delicious   Add to Digg   Add to Facebook   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Article

The Processing and Interpretation of Verb Phrase Ellipsis Constructions by Children at Normal and Slowed Speech Rates

Sarah M. Callahana
Matthew Walenskia,,b
Tracy Lovea,,b
a School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University
b Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego

Correspondence to Tracy Love: tlove{at}mail.sdsu.edu

Purpose: To examine children's comprehension of verb phrase (VP) ellipsis constructions in light of their automatic, online structural processing abilities and conscious, metalinguistic reflective skill.

Method: Forty-two children ages 5 through 12 years listened to VP ellipsis constructions involving the strict/sloppy ambiguity (e.g., "The janitor untangled himself from the rope and the fireman in the elementary school did too after the accident.") in which the ellipsis phrase ("did too") had 2 interpretations: (a) strict ("untangled the janitor") and (b) sloppy ("untangled the fireman"). We examined these sentences at a normal speech rate with an online cross-modal picture priming task (n = 14) and an offline sentence–picture matching task (n = 11). Both tasks were also given with slowed speech input (n = 17).

Results: Children showed priming for both the strict and sloppy interpretations at a normal speech rate but only for the strict interpretation with slowed input. Offline, children displayed an adultlike preference for the sloppy interpretation with normal-rate input but a divergent pattern with slowed speech.

Conclusions: Our results suggest that children and adults rely on a hybrid syntax-discourse model for the online comprehension and offline interpretation of VP ellipsis constructions. This model incorporates a temporally sensitive syntactic process of VP reconstruction (disrupted with slow input) and a temporally protracted discourse effect attributed to parallelism (preserved with slow input).

KEY WORDS: verb phrase ellipsis, anaphors, cross-modal priming, online, offline, language comprehension, speech rate


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Delicious Delicious   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Facebook Facebook   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?