TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lassotta, Romy
A1  - Omaki, Akira
A1  - Franck, Julie
T1  - Developmental changes in misinterpretation of garden-path wh-questions in French
JF  - The quarterly journal of experimental psychology
N2  - This study explores (mis)interpretation of biclausal wh-questions by French-speaking adults and children, aiming to investigate cross-linguistic differences in sentence revision mechanisms. Following previous work in Japanese the ambiguity of wh-questions was manipulated: In ambiguous questions, the fronted wh-phrase could be associated with the first, main-clause verb or the second, embedded-clause verb, while in garden-path questions, an inserted filled-gap prepositional phrase (PP) blocked main-clause attachment. Importantly, French differs from Japanese in that the filled gap arises after the first verb-that is, after the wh-phrase has been interpreted within the main clause. Two story-based comprehension experiments were conducted to probe the effect of word order on revision performance. Adults and children frequently provided main-clause interpretations of ambiguous questions. In filled-gap questions, children displayed relatively acute sensitivity to the filled-gap in wh-argument questions (Experiment 2), but not in wh-adjunct questions (Experiment 1); adults showed surprisingly low sensitivity to it, frequently misinterpreting adjunct and argument questions. Acceptability ratings (Experiment 3) showed that adults systematically prefer in situ questions over wh-fronting questions. We conclude that timing of the error signal influences revision, and that whereas French-speaking children prioritize syntactic cues, adults prioritize distributional information about the optionality of wh-fronting in French.
KW  - Wh-questions
KW  - Misinterpretation
KW  - Garden-path
KW  - Sentence revision
KW  - Filled-gap dependency
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1054845
SN  - 1747-0218
SN  - 1747-0226
VL  - 69
SP  - 829
EP  - 854
PB  - Nature Publ. Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -