engleski

Examining implicit causality bias in children online: outline of the experimental design

One of the main prerequisites for spoken language comprehension is the ability to resolve referential relations (Järvikivi et al. 2014). Some verbs have been recognized as carrying the inherent information about how the referents in the sentence will be interpreted. This verb bias is known as an implicit causality (IC) bias (Hartshorne & Snedeker 2013), and it guides listeners towards the referent that is likely to be the cause of the event or state. IC verbs differ regarding direction and strength of the bias, but are relatively stable across languages (Hartshorne et al. 2013). IC bias has been of great interest to psycholinguists who investigate when this effect is activated during online comprehension. According to the immediate focusing account (Carreiras et al. 1996), IC verbs influence one’s referential preferences very early in the sentence, at the beginning of the second clause. On the other hand, the clausal integration account (Stewart et al. 2000) suggests that verb bias is activated at or towards the end of the second clause. Two accounts have often been contrasted, but studies indicate that IC bias has its effect immediately after the verb is encountered (review: Koornneef & Sanders 2013). The majority of IC bias studies focused on adults. It remains unclear how children use this information to resolve a reference. Previous research suggests that language processing strategies between children and adults are similar (e.g, the first-mention or subject bias), but children’s strategies seem to be less stable or have a later effect during online processing (Arnold et al. 2019). It has been found that preschool children are sensitive to IC bias as well (Au 1986 ; Corrigan & Stevenson 1994). However, these results were obtained using offline completion tasks and no further research using more sophisticated online methods has been conducted. This study aims to investigate the influence of IC bias on online spoken comprehension of 10-year old children in Croatian, i.e. to observe when and how this effect modulates their expectations about the likely referent. Offline methods provide information only about the final stages of processing. Using online methods one can measure participants’ unconscious and automatic response to language stimuli (Marinis 2010). Despite their obvious advantages over offline methods, online methods also pose certain challenges. To choose the ideal online method, one must consider various aspects of the design. The final choice will depend on the study aims, type of stimuli (auditory/picture/written text), as well as on participants’ age and language status. Equally important are experiment length, instructions provided, and the amount and type of filler stimuli. All these can influence participants’ response strategies and performance, which will reflect on the quality and interpretability of data. After considering all the benefits and challenges of online methods, our method of choice for IC bias study in Croatian is the visual world paradigm. The presentation will outline and discuss the experimental design of the study which is now in its initial stages. All relevant methodological aspects, namely participants, stimuli and procedure will be discussed.

implicit causality verbs, acquisition of reference, experimental design, visual world paradigm, Croatian

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