Children’s comprehension and repair of garden-path wh-questions

ABSTRACT Children’s sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous wh-questions like Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?, they preferentially associate the wh-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g., She explained at the campsite). This preferred association results in shorter syntactic dependencies compared to second verb associations (i.e., the embedded clause interpretation: She rode in the forest). Moreover, this bias toward shorter dependencies persists in “filled-gap” wh-questions, where the preferred interpretation is blocked by a prepositional phrase (e.g., Where did Annie explain at the campsite that she rode her horse?). Here, adults preferentially suppress their main clause bias and adopt embedded clause interpretations, whereas children still prefer their initial interpretations. The present study investigates how English-speaking children interpret ambiguous and filled-gap wh-questions. Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that children struggle to adopt second verb associations when first verb interpretations are unavailable. In five story-based experiments, we show that English-speaking children prefer main clause (first verb) interpretations in both wh-question conditions—although they seem to adopt more second verb associations than has been previously reported for children in other languages. We also document a novel repair strategy used by adults and children in which they describe who was at the main clause event rather than where it occurred. Taken together, our findings highlight the cross-linguistic stability of children’s shorter dependency biases and suggest that children’s abilities to inhibit preferred interpretations may be shaped by the development of language-specific syntactic knowledge.