Priming syntactic ambiguity resolution in children and adults

Adults use their recent experience to disambiguate ambiguous sentences: Structures that haverecently been primed are favored in the resolution of different types of ambiguity, an example ofstructural priming. Research on children’s use of recent information for disambiguation is scarce.Using a forced-choice task with a tablet, we asked whether 5-6-year-old French-speakingchildren could also be primed in the resolution of attachment ambiguities, as well as whetherlisteners are affected by the proportion of primes of each structure, and whether priming iscumulative. We found that both children and adults can be primed, and are sensitive to theproportion of structures in the input, and that priming effects cumulate as the experimentprogresses. This is the first study showing priming of ambiguous sentences at 5-6 years,suggesting that children, like adults, use recent experience as a source of disambiguatinginformation.