Pronoun Resolution in Children - Investigating the Developmental Trajectory Towards Adult-like Pronoun Interpretation

This project investigates how language processing develops in young children, and in particular examines how children interpret pronouns such as ‘he’ or ‘she’. Previous research has shown that children do not always interpret pronouns in the same way as adults. This project aims to investigate the conditions under which children may interpret such pronouns differently to adults, and the developmental trajectory that leads to adult-like interpretation. This PhD project will involve the ‘visual world’ eye-tracking paradigm. In the visual world paradigm, participants listen to sentences and view a visual scene while their eye-movements are monitored. Participant’s eye-movements across the visual scene can inform us about how a sentence is interpreted as it unfolds. This project will involve developing and running a series of visual world paradigm studies, with children aged between 5-10 years old and adult controls.