CHILDREN'S PERCEPTIONS OF CHANGES IN SIZE OF TELEVISED IMAGES

Using a Piagétan perspective, this study investigated the ways in which elementary school children perceive changes in the size of a televised image (in this case, a candy bar). The findings suggest that younger children perceive changes in image size from a medium shot to a close-up as changes in the object itself. Children's responses to changes in the televised image parallel their responses to traditional conservation tasks, but conservation of televised images occurs at a later age. In addition, children appear to use different cognitive skills to interpret how a zoom or a cut transforms the size of a televised image. When a zoom is used, children more readily perceive the object as “growing larger.”     

The influence of only on syntactic processing of "long" relative clause sentences

We report an eye movement experiment investigating the influence of the focus operator only on syntactic processing of "long" relative clause sentences. Paterson, Liversedge, and Underwood (1999) found that readers were garden pathed by "short" reduced relative clause sentences containing the focus operator only . They argued that due to thematic differences between "short" and "long" relative clause sentences, garden path effect might not occur when "long" reduced relative clause sentences are read. Eye-tracking data show that garden path effects found during initial processing of the disambiguating verb of "long" reduced sentences without only were absent or delayed in the case of counterparts with only . We discuss our results in terms of current theories of sentence processing.