Incremental processing of prenominal modifiers by three-year-olds: Effects of prototypicality and referential contrast

Abstract

Adults often use prenominal adjectives for predicting the upcoming referent, either based on one’s knowledge of prototypical exemplars (e.g., elephants are always big) or based on the contrasting properties of objects (e.g., big box vs. small box). This paper seeks to determine whether Dutch-speaking three-year-olds can also process adjective-noun phrases incrementally and use the information provided in the adjective to identify the target referent even before the noun is pronounced. In order to test this, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment using the Visual World Paradigm. The results replicate previous research by showing that three-year-olds are able to identify the target referent through their knowledge of prototypical exemplars as fast as adults, even before the noun is pronounced. However, our results reveal that the ability to use contrastive information for referent identification is far more limited at that age, indicating that contrastive (relative) processing of prenominal adjectives is more demanding than prototype-based (absolute) interpretations.