Uh, What Did You Say? Children’s Parsing Preferences are Altered by Experience with Disfluent Sentences

Children can be primed to anticipate a recently heard sentence structure. This is more likely to occur when the structures of the primes are unlikely, or surprising, for a given context. The disfluency (uh) is more likely to occur in these surprising sentences. Moreover, recent work suggests that children may anticipate alternative sentence structures when encountering this type of disfluency. This anticipation could lead to differences in how well expectations align with the input and, consequently, differences in how likely children are to be primed. However, whether disfluencies modulate priming effects has not been explored. In a comprehension priming task with English-speaking 3- and 5-year-olds living in the United States, we found that children’s parsing preferences were altered by disfluent primes. When children heard disfluent primes, priming effects were reduced, or children were primed by the structure associated with the prime’s verb bias rather than the actual heard structure. The strength and the onset of these effects differed by the speaker’s predictability and the children’s age.