Children’s and Adults’ Processing of Anomaly and Implausibility during Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements.

Holly Joseph, Simon Liversedge, Hazel Blythe, Sarah White, Susan Gathercole, Keith Rayner

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

62 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The eye movements of 24 children and 24 adults were monitored to compare how they read sentences containing plausible, implausible, and anomalous thematic relations. In the implausible condition the incongruity occurred due to the incompatibility of two objects involved in the event denoted by the main verb. In the anomalous condition the direct object of the verb was not a possible verb argument. Adults exhibited immediate disruption with the anomalous sentences as compared to the implausible sentences as indexed by longer gaze durations on the target word. Children exhibited the same pattern of effects as adults as far as the anomalous sentences were concerned, but exhibited delayed effects of implausibility. These data indicate that while children and adults are alike in their basic thematic assignment processes during reading, children may be delayed in the efficiency with which they are able to integrate pragmatic and real-world knowledge into their discourse representation.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)708-723
JournalQuarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Volume61
Issue number5
Early online date1 May 2008
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2008
Externally publishedYes

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