Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

During sentence comprehension, listeners form expectationsabout likely structures before they have reached the end of asentence. Children are more likely than adults to ignore late-arriving evidence when it contradicts their initial parse. Whilethis difference is often ascribed to developmental changes inexecutive function, this paper investigates whether statisticalproperties of child-directed speech could be responsible forchildren’s failure to revise temporarily ambiguous sentences.We examined well-studied garden-path sentences andcalculated surprisal values derived from adult and child-directed corpora at each word. For adult corpora, surprisal washighest where the sentence structure was disambiguated. Forchild corpora, however, values at the disambiguating regionwere low relative to other words in the sentence. This suggeststhat for children, the disambiguating words may be statisticallyweak cues to ruling out their original parse, and that inprinciple, the statistics of child-directed speech couldcontribute to children’s difficulty with garden-path sentences.