Antecedent priming at trace positions in children’s sentence processing
The present study examines whether children reactivate a moved constituent
at its gap position and how children’s more limited working memory span affects
the way they process filler-gap dependencies. 46 5–7 year-old children and 54 adult
controls participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment and underwent
a standardized working memory test. The results revealed a statistically significant
interaction between the participants’ working memory span and antecedent reactivation:
High-span children (n = 19) and high-span adults (n = 22) showed evidence
of antecedent priming at the gap site, while for low-span children and adults, there
was no such effect. The antecedent priming effect in the high-span participants indicates
that in both children and adults, dislocated arguments access their antecedents
at gap positions. The absence of an antecedent reactivation effect in the low-span
participants could mean that these participants required more time to integrate the
dislocated constituent and reactivated the filler later during the sentence.
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