Editing Syntactic ambiguity (section)

==Differences in processing==

=== Children and adults ===
[[Children's use of information#Children's judgments about ignorant and ambiguous sources|Children interpret ambiguous sentences]] differently from adults due to lack of experience. Children have not yet learned how the environment and contextual clues can suggest a certain interpretation of a sentence. They have also not yet developed the ability to acknowledge that ambiguous words and phrases can be interpreted multiple ways.<ref>{{cite web|title=The use of referential context in children's online interpretation of adjectives|url=https://software.rc.fas.harvard.edu/lds/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Huang_Snedeker_Ref_Adj.pdf|access-date=4 November 2013|author=Yi Ting Huang|author2=Jesse Snedeker|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150610202525/https://software.rc.fas.harvard.edu/lds/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Huang_Snedeker_Ref_Adj.pdf|archive-date=10 June 2015|url-status=dead|df=dmy-all}}</ref> As children read and interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences, the speed at which initial syntactic commitments are made is lower in children than in adults. Furthermore, children appear to be less skilled at directing their attention back to the part of the sentence that is most informative in terms of aiding reanalysis.<ref>{{cite journal|title=Children's and Adults' On-Line Processing of Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences during Reading|author=Holly S. S. L. Joseph|author2=Simon P. Liversedge|doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0054141|pmid=23349807|pmc=3547875|volume=8|issue=1|journal=PLOS ONE|page=e54141|year=2013|bibcode=2013PLoSO...854141J|doi-access=free}}</ref> Other evidence attributes differences in interpreting ambiguous sentences to [[working memory]] span.  While adults tend to have a higher working memory span, they sometimes spend more time resolving the ambiguity but tend to be more accurate in their final interpretation. Children, in contrast, can decide quickly on an interpretation because they consider only the interpretations their working memory can hold.<ref name=":1">{{cite journal|title=Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity|author=Maryellen C. MacDonald|author2=Marcel A. Just|doi=10.1016/0010-0285(92)90003-K|pmid=1537232|volume=24|issue=1|journal=Cognitive Psychology|pages=56–98|year=1992|s2cid=23695158}}</ref>

=== Low reading span vs. high reading span adults ===
For low [[Reading span task|reading span]] adults who had the worst verbal working memory, they took longer to process the sentences with the [[reduced relative clause]] compared to the [[relative clause]] and had similar times from [[Animacy|inanimate or animate subjects]]. For high reading span subjects who had the best verbal working memory, they were overall faster than the low reading span subjects. Within the high reading span subjects, however, they responded faster to inanimate subjects and took longer to respond to animate subjects. This was because the animate subjects had a greater propensity to create a [[Garden-path sentence|garden path sentence]] ''because of'' (not despite) greater verbal working memory. This suggested that since the low reading span subjects had less cognitive resources, only syntactic cues could be processed while high reading span subjects had more cognitive resources and could thus get tripped up with the garden path sentence.<ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Ferreira|first1=Fernanda|last2=Clifton|first2=Charles|date=1986-06-01|title=The independence of syntactic processing|journal=Journal of Memory and Language|volume=25|issue=3|pages=348–368|doi=10.1016/0749-596X(86)90006-9|issn=0749-596X}}</ref>