The Acquisition of ‘Bridging’ Tested with the Coloring Book Method

Abstract

‘Bridging’ allows for the use of a definite referent that has not been previously introduced in the discourse, because both speaker and hearer know it refers to a previously mentioned indefinite referent, based on their world knowledge (Asher and Lascarides, J Semant 15(1):83–113, 1998). Avrutin and Coopmans, BUCLD 24: Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development Boston. Cascadilla Press, Somerville (2000) demonstrated that four-year-old children already have knowledge of bridging inferences and that they are able to implement their knowledge of this syntax-discourse interface phenomenon in a truth-value judgment task relatively well, while three-year-olds performed significantly worse. In order to investigate the possibility that the poor performance of pre-school children was due to task-specific properties, and specifically high cognitive demand, the present study investigated bridging comprehension of 89 Dutch three- and four-year-old children with the Coloring Book, a new experimental method which tests children’s language comprehension in a more ecological manner (Pinto and Zuckerman, Behavior Research Methods 1–20, 2018). The results show that performance on bridging comprehension strongly improved; four-year-olds performed 95% adultlike and three-year-olds, 91%. Thus, children preferred a linguistic interpretation based on bridging over an interpretation based on deixis. In addition, the present study explored the effects of animacy and the degree to which the two referents form a unity on children’s comprehension of bridging constructions.