Accessibility navigation


Children’s and Adults’ Processing of Anomaly and Implausibility during Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements

Joseph, H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4325-4628, Liversedge, S. P., Blythe, H. I., White, S. J., Gathercole, S. E. and Rayner, K. (2008) Children’s and Adults’ Processing of Anomaly and Implausibility during Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. ISSN 1747-0218

[img] Text - Accepted Version
· Restricted to Repository staff only
· The Copyright of this document has not been checked yet. This may affect its availability.

134kB

It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing.

Abstract/Summary

The eye movements of 24 children and 24 adults were monitored to compare how they read sentences containing plausible, implausible, and anomalous thematic relations. In the implausible condition the incongruity occurred due to the incompatibility of two objects involved in the event denoted by the main verb. In the anomalous condition the direct object of the verb was not a possible verb argument. Adults exhibited immediate disruption with the anomalous sentences as compared to the implausible sentences as indexed by longer gaze durations on the target word. Children exhibited the same pattern of effects as adults as far as the anomalous sentences were concerned, but exhibited delayed effects of implausibility. These data indicate that while children and adults are alike in their basic thematic assignment processes during reading, children may be delayed in the efficiency with which they are able to integrate pragmatic and real world knowledge into their discourse representation.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM)
Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Institute of Education > Language and Literacy in Education
ID Code:43406

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Page navigation