Development of noisy-channel parsing: Final accuracy paves the way for faster processing

Compared to adults, school-aged children parse sentences more slowly, incorporate discourse and world knowledge less readily, and often fail to revise initial mispredictions. While prior research focuses on isolating the cause of developmental differences in syntactic parsing, there remains a more fundamental challenge of describing what structures are targets of developmental change, and when these effects emerge in processing. The current study investigates these questions in typically developing children, ages 4 to 9 years. Children heard spoken presentations of intransitives, transitives, and relative clauses while their eye-movements were measured to images of two events. Across a broad range of structures, children revealed distinct performance in off-line vs. on-line performance. While action accuracy increased with age for all sentence types, correct fixations after the disambiguating cues in sentences revealed age-related gains for intransitives, actives, and subject RCs. Critically, we found limited evidence of age effects in on-line interpretations of passives and object RCs. Together, our findings are consistent with an account of developmental parsing, whereby children solve bandwidth limitations in real-time processing by first mastering off-line interpretations before investing in more efficient on-line access.