Peer-reviewed article
Situation models support referential prediction at 36 months of age.
Yuile AR, Fisher C, Borovsky A ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This is a cognitive science study examining how toddlers aged 36 months process language and predict referents using situation models during story comprehension. The research used eye-tracking to measure whether children could predict which character would be mentioned next based on story context. The study found that children with stronger language skills were better able to make these predictions, while those with language delay did not consistently generate these inferences.
Key points
- 36-month-olds use story context to predict which character will be mentioned next in narratives
- Children treat disambiguated references as unambiguous when prior story information eliminates alternatives
- Individual differences in language skills predict success at generating these predictive inferences
- Children with language delay did not reliably generate these inferences in exploratory analyses
Limitations
This study measures a specific cognitive-linguistic ability in a laboratory setting and does not address broader child well-being outcomes, health, protection, or development in practical domains. The findings relate to language processing mechanisms rather than interventions or strategies for improving child welfare.
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 play with her," 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).