Doctoral Dissertation Research: Children's Awareness of Syntactic Ambiguity

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Literacy education is a topic of national importance because the reading skills of a nation's adult population affect their productivity and economic advancement. Adults who struggle with reading often have done so since early childhood. Thus, it is essential to probe all skills that lead to reading success at an early age. This research examines children's awareness of ambiguity, a linguistic skill that contributes to reading. After children learn letter-sound correspondences in words, they begin reading sentences and texts. Awareness of when a sentence has multiple meanings helps the reader integrate the sentence into the whole text using context cues. Many children struggle with this, however. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 46% of third-graders are able to use context cues to derive meaning from a text. Because ambiguity detection influences text comprehension, the question of whether it can be improved with training is important. Focus on ambiguous sentences could supplement early literacy curriculum and inform intervention techniques for struggling readers. This psycholinguistic research explores children's awareness of syntactic ambiguity, as illustrated in this sentence: "The boy saw the girl with binoculars." If the prepositional phrase "with binoculars" modifies the verb "saw," then this sentence means that the boy used binoculars to see the girl. If it modifies the noun phrase "the girl," the sentence means that the boy saw the girl who has the binoculars. The two sentence meanings have very different meanings, and detecting such ambiguity influences text comprehension. One of the studies in this project investigates whether pre-school children are consciously aware that such a sentence has multiple meanings. The second study asks whether ambiguity awareness can be improved with simple training over a period of a few weeks. The second study also examines correlations between improvement in ambiguity detection and improvements on measures of reading readiness. This research advances the study of language development with new data on children's linguistic knowledge. It is also relevant to a body of research on sentence processing suggesting that children rely on fewer types of information than adults do.