Who’s participating? Figuring out the number of event participants

In conversations, speakers use words like “someone” to introduce new individuals into the discourse context, and they use words like “who” to seek information about these individuals. Previous research has found that children differ from adults in how they interpret words like “someone.” The present study asks whether children also differ from adults in interpreting information-seeking question words like “which person”. The findings of the study will add to our understanding of how children learn to engage in conversations, and will offer insight into the human sentence processing mechanism and computational models of human sentence processing.