Situation models support referential prediction at 36 months of age

Abstract

Adults generate causally-structured situation models during comprehension and use them to predict upcoming referents. In an eye-tracked comprehension task, 36-month-olds (N = 115) did the same, using story-provided information to predict which character could plausibly be mentioned next. In critical sentences such as “She asked the goose with the boots to…”, children treated “the goose” as unambiguous even in a story with two geese, looking toward the target animal before disambiguating information arrived if one goose was described as having left the scene earlier in the story. Success in this task implies predictive use of a situation model to infer reference to a still-present character. Individual differences in language skills predicted inference generation, and exploratory analyses suggested children with language delay did not generate these inferences.