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Viewing report
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The Role of Verification Strategies. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, June 2009, Pages: 248
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.
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