Development of noisy-channel parsing: Age-related changes in children’s prior expectations
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Compared to adults, school-aged children parse sentences more slowly, incorporate discourse and world knowledge less readily, and often misinterpret infrequent and garden-path structures. While prior research focuses on isolating the cause of developmental differences, there remains a fundamental need to characterize how children’s parsing strategies interact with context properties. Adopting an eye-tracking paradigm, the current study investigates the extent to which typically developing 4- to 9-year-olds rely on prior expectations when interpreting sentence meanings in contexts that induces substantial uncertainty about who did what to whom. Across transitive and relative clause structures, children revealed distinct performance in off-line vs. on-line comprehension. While action accuracy improved with age for all sentence types, analysis of correct fixations after disambiguation revealed greater age-related changes for canonical (actives, subject RCs) compared to non-canonical structures (passives, object RCs). Age effects on comprehension of canonical structures persisted even when off-line construction-specific accuracy was accounted for. Our findings are consistent with the development of noisy-channel parsing, whereby children solve uncertainty about signal properties across development through enhanced reliance on prior expectations, which are structured according to frequent representations that generate cross-situational variability over the entirety of their language.
Institution: University of Maryland, College Park
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203826774