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When hearing a sentence, have you ever paused to wonder if a phrase could mean something completely different? For young children, this ability—detecting and resolving ambiguities in speech—could hold the key to their future reading success. Recent research reveals that 5-to-6-year-olds who excel at identifying ambiguities in spoken language are more likely to become strong readers in their early school years (e.g., Kamowski-Shakibai & Cairns, 2016; Smith Cairns et al., 2004; Wankoff & Cairns, 2009). But what drives this connection?
Some researchers suggest that success in ambiguity detection reflects children’s language abilities (e.g.,Huang & Hollister, 2019; Wankoff & Cairns, 2009), which are closely tied to socioeconomic factors (e.g., Huang et al., 2023; Huang & Hollister, 2019) and are known to influence literacy development (e.g., Lervåg et al., 2018). Others argue that it’s cognitive control—skills like attention shifting and conflict resolution—that best explain this relationship (e.g., Thothathiri et al., 2025; Woodard et al., 2016). Surprisingly, no previous studies have examined these possibilities together.
To address this gap, we conducted a study with 38 French-speaking preschoolers, aged 5 to 6. Each child participated in tasks measuring their ability to detect ambiguities, their cognitive control (using a Flanker-No/Go task), and their language skills (standard vocabulary and oral comprehension assessments). We also collected data on maternal education as an indicator of socioeconomic status.
How Do You Test Ambiguity Detection?
Children were presented with sentences that varied in their ambiguity:
- Lexical ambiguities, like the French word [mɛʁ], which can mean “mother” or “sea.” in “La fille court vers la mère/mer” – The girl runs towards the mother/sea.
- Structural ambiguities, such as “The boy kissed the girl with the teddy bear,” which could mean either “the boy used the bear to kiss the girl” or “the boy kissed the girl who was holding the bear”.
- Unambiguous sentences for comparison.
After hearing each sentence, children viewed four pictures. For ambiguous sentences, two pictures depicted different meanings of the sentence, while the others were distractors. For unambiguous sentences, two pictures depicted different illustrations of the same meaning and the others were distractors. Children earned points based on their ability to identify all correct interpretations, even with prompts to guide them through the process.
What Did We Find?
The results revealed that 5-to-6-year-olds show wide variation in their ability to detect ambiguities in both lexical and structural forms. Most strikingly, children’s cognitive control skills—measured by their performance on the Flanker task—were the strongest predictor of their ambiguity detection abilities. Neither overall language scores, nor socioeconomic status was as closely tied to success in this task.
This finding is significant because it suggests that ambiguity detection involves more than just language knowledge; it also requires managing representational conflict and shifting attention between possible interpretations.
Why Does This Matter for Reading Development?
Ambiguity detection has been shown to predict reading abilities in first-to-third grade. Our study suggests that this connection may be mediated by cognitive control. As children learn to read, they face many ambiguities—figuring out which meaning of a word fits the context or parsing a sentence structure. Strong cognitive control could help children navigate these challenges, setting the stage for better reading comprehension.
What’s Next?
This study is the first to demonstrate that the ambiguity detection task not only predicts reading success but also reflects children’s cognitive control abilities. To further investigate this relationship, we plan to follow these children over the next two years as they begin to read. By tracking their progress, we aim to understand how cognitive control, language skills, and ambiguity detection together shape their reading development.
If our predictions hold, we’ll have strong evidence that cognitive control is a critical driver of the link between early ambiguity detection and later reading success. This could open new pathways for educational interventions, emphasizing the development of cognitive control alongside traditional methods to improve literacy skills.
Our findings add to a growing body of research highlighting the complex interplay between cognitive and linguistic abilities in early childhood. They remind us that what seems like a simple skill—spotting double meanings—might be a window into a much larger developmental process.
References:
Article on the spot: Bigot, V., Trueswell, J., & de Carvalho, A. (2025). Cognitive Control skills are related to ambiguity awareness in French-learning 5-to-6-year-olds: Implications for reading development. Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70089
Huang, Y. T., Byrd, A. S., Asmah, R., & Domanski, S. (2023). Evaluating “Meaningful Differences” in Learning and Communication Across SES Backgrounds. Annual Review of Linguistics, 9(1), 589–608. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521-045816
Huang, Y. T., & Hollister, E. (2019). Developmental parsing and linguistic knowledge: Reexamining the role of cognitive control in the kindergarten path effect. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 184(xxxx), 210–219. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.04.005
Kamowski-Shakibai, M. T., & Cairns, H. S. (2016). Kindergarten children can be taught to detect lexical ambiguities. Journal of Child Language, 43(02), 442–456. https://doi.org/10.1017/S030500091500015X
Lervåg, A., Hulme, C., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2018). Unpicking the Developmental Relationship Between Oral Language Skills and Reading Comprehension: It’s Simple, But Complex. Child Development, 89(5), 1821–1838. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12861
Smith Cairns, H., Waltzman, D., & Schlisselberg, G. (2004). Detecting the Ambiguity of Sentences: Relationship to Early Reading Skill. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 25(2), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/15257401040250020401
Thothathiri, M., Kidd, E., & Rowland, C. (2025). The role of executive function in the processing and acquisition of syntax. Royal Society Open Science, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201497
Wankoff, L. S., & Cairns, H. S. (2009). Why Ambiguity Detection Is a Predictor of Early Reading Skill. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 30(3), 183–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525740108324096
Woodard, K., Pozzan, L., & Trueswell, J. C. (2016). Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 141, 187–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2015.08.005
