Children appear capable of using lexical information to resolve Essay

Children appear capable of using lexical information to resolve syntactic ambiguities, but their ability to use referential information is questionable. Discuss - Essay Example gely thought to have acquired the linguistic facts of their language, the focus of adult psycholinguistic research has been on how they process language as they hear or use it. On the other hand, the focus of child language research has been on the documentation of children’s knowledge states at various points in development; with very little emphasis on how they process their language. This appears to be an area needing further investigation as, logically, children need also apply a meaningful analysis to their inputs in order to learn language. That is, acquisition necessarily implies that parser. This paper examines the aspect of difficulties and limitations encountered by children in using referential information while they deploy with ease lexical information to resolve syntactic ambiguities. 5 The main emphasis of the Psycholinguistic research has been on comprehending as to how adults interpret language in real time. Several authors (Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1991; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995;Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Britt, 1994) have uncovered ,within this domain of examination a complex and interactive language 6 processing system capable of swift and almost instantaneous coordination of linguistic characteristics of the message with contextual or scene specific information. Trueswell et al (1999) investigated the moment by moment language learning process in children using a technique that involved recording eye movements, done deploying a head-mounted eye-tracking system to monitor eye movements, as participants responded to spoken instructions. This research found that,† systematic differences in how children and adults process spoken language: Five Year Olds did not take into account relevant discourse/pragmatic principles when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities, and showed little or no ability to revise initial parsing commitments. Adults showed sensitivity to these discourse constraints at the earliest