Abstract

Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Second, in contrast to adults, children in similar listening studies fail to use this referential information and appear to rely exclusively on verb biases or perhaps syntactically based parsing principles (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). We explore these contrasts by fully crossing verb bias and referential manipulations in a study using the eye-gaze listening technique with adults (Experiment 1) and Wve-year-olds (Experiment 2). Results indicate that adults combine lexical and referential information to determine syntactic choice. Children rely A portion of this work was presented in proceedings to the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. The ideas in this paper owe much to our conversations with Lila Gleitman and to the comments of the many audiences who heard preliminary reports of this research. We thank Kirsten Thorpe for her assistance with testing, coding, and participant recruitment and Sylvia Yuan for her assistance in data analysis. We also gratefully acknowledge Tracy Dardick who carried out the norming studies and Jared Novick and David January who assisted in comparisons between head-mounted eye-tracking and our procedure. This work was supported by NIH Grant 1-R01-HD37507 to the second author and a National Science Foundation Science and Technology grant to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania (NSF-STC Coo...

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