Developmental parsing and linguistic knowledge: Reexamining the role of cognitive control in the kindergarten path effect.

During spoken language comprehension, young children have difficulties in revising incorrect predictions about the structural properties of sentences. Recent research on individual differences suggests that these errors may reflect immature cognitive control. However, this evidence overlooks challenges with interpreting cross-task correlations and additional effects of linguistic knowledge on developmental parsing. To account for within-individual variation in task performance, this study compared sentence comprehension across two samples: one where socioeconomic status (SES) background was related to global language knowledge (Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test; n = 60) and another where it was related to cognitive control abilities (Stroop task; n = 46). Children (3- to 6-year-olds) heard sentences with an agent-first bias (e.g., "The blicket will be quickly …") that predicted late-arriving verb morphology (e.g., actives: "… eating the seal") or conflicted with this cue (e.g., passives: "… eaten by the seal"). Consistent with prior work, final interpretations were less accurate when revision was needed for passives compared with actives. Critically, when SES was a proxy for global language variation, children from higher-SES backgrounds revised mispredictions more than their lower-SES peers on average. However, when SES tracked variation in cognitive control instead, SES effects on revision were absent. This suggests that variation in revising mispredictions during development may be related to linguistic knowledge rather than cognitive control. We discuss these results in light of known effects of linguistic knowledge on sentence comprehension and describe an information-theoretic account for why limited knowledge may lead children to favor predicted meanings over revised meanings during comprehension.