Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles

Abstract

We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6-7 years, 8 -10 years, 11 -12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers. q

The influence of only and even on online semantic interpretation

“…Relatively little psycholinguistic research has investigated how these devices influence online language comprehension, with existing work concentrating on the influence of only on the processing of syntactic ambiguities (following Ni, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1996; see also Filik, Paterson, & Liversedge, 2005;Liversedge, Paterson, & Clayes, 2002;Paterson, Liversedge, & Underwood, 1999;Sedivy, 2002) or the acquisition of semantics (Paterson, Liversedge, Rowland, & Filik, 2003). There has been much less research into the nature of the contrasts these words elicit, but see Paterson et al (2007) for evidence that contrastive focus is computed online during sentence processing.…”

Restrictions on addition: children's interpretation of the focus particles auch ‘also’ and nur ‘only’ in German

“…Several studies have provided convergent evidence that children have difficulties, possibly beyond preschool age, in correctly interpreting sentences with focus particles like also and only in various languages (e.g. Bergsma, 2002 ;Costa & Szendrői, 2006 ;Crain, Ni & Conway, 1994 ;Drozd & van Loosbroek, 1998 ;Gualmini, Maciukaite & Crain, 2003 ;Hü ttner, Drenhaus, van de Vijver & Weissenborn, 2004 ;Matsuoka, 2004 ;Matsuoka et al, 2006;Notley, Zhou, Crain & Thornton, 2009 ;Paterson, Liversedge, Rowland & Filik, 2003 ;Zhou & Crain, 2010 ; for different results, see Höhle et al, 2009). …”

“…Hence, young children are assumed to tend to misinterpret subject-associated only as if it were associated with the VP/object or to vary freely between VP/object-and subject-association. 3 Paterson et al (2003) pointed out another difficulty for children which may lead instead to not taking into account the meaning contribution of only : children may not always be able to instantiate the alternative set of the focused expression in the discourse model when processing sentences with only, which may result in their ' ignoring ' the particle as there is no alternative set in the child's discourse model that the particle could operate on. English-speaking children in this study often accepted sentences containing only as in The fireman is only holding a hose or Only the fireman is holding a hose as appropriate descriptions of pictures displaying a fireman holding a hose and a ladder or a fireman and a policeman holding a hose, respectively, when tested in sentence verification tasks or picture selection tasks.…”

On Children's Semantic Knowledge: Issues in the Acquisition of Quantifier-Negation Interaction and of Additive Particles

“…However, taking into account that children sometimes assign adult-like interpretation to sentences containing only, Paterson et al (2003) conclude that they do not lack the knowledge responsible for a restrictive meaning contributed by only. Paterson et al (2003) attribute children's failure to compute a meaning based on a set of alternatives to their less well-developed pragmatic knowledge. The question remains as to whether Paterson et al's (2003) pragmatic explanation can account for the results of Bergsma's experiment.…”

“…The discussion in these studies is based on the implicit assumption that children are sensitive to the meaning that is computed based on a set of alternatives, though it is not explicitly shown in their experiment that this is the case. Paterson et al (2003), on the other hand, conducted experiments to investigate whether English-speaking children could compute a restrictive meaning based on a set of alternatives in the interpretation of sentences containing only. The results show that 4-to 7-year-old children often fail to compute such a meaning.…”