Children's Interpretation of Ambiguous Focus in Sentences With "Only"
- 1 July 2006
- journal article
- Published by Informa UK Limited in Language Acquisition
- Vol. 13 (3), 253-284
- https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327817la1303_4
Abstract
We report 3 studies investigating children's and adults' interpretation of ambiguous focus in sentences containing the focus-sensitive quantifier only. In each experiment, child and adult participants compared sentences with only in a preverbal position and counterpart sentences without only against a series of pictures depicting events that matched or mismatched with the sentence meaning. The sentences with only were ambiguous between an analysis with contrastive focus assigned to the verb phrase (VP) and one with contrastive focus assigned to the direct object. The results indicate that both children and adults interpreted sentences with only as excluding the possibility of events that formed a contrast with VP constituents. Children also appeared to interpret sentences without only as excluding the possibility of these events despite the absence of grammatical cues that might indicate contrastive focus. We consider these results in relation to a processing account of focus interpretation (Crain, Ni, an...Keywords
This publication has 17 references indexed in Scilit:
- Parsing with focus particles in context: Eye movements during the processing of relative clause ambiguitiesJournal of Memory and Language, 2005
- Invoking Discourse-Based Contrast Sets and Resolving Syntactic AmbiguitiesJournal of Memory and Language, 2002
- The Influence of only on Syntactic processing of “Long” Relative Clause SentencesThe Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 2002
- Children's weak interpretations of universally quantified questionsPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2001
- Effects of the Focus Particle Only and Intrinsic Contrast on Comprehension of Reduced Relative ClausesPublished by Elsevier BV ,2000
- The Influence of Focus Operators on Syntactic Processing of Short Relative Clause SentencesThe Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 1999
- Identificational Focus versus Information FocusLanguage, 1998
- Sidestepping Garden Paths: Assessing the Contributions of Syntax, Semantics and Plausibility in Resolving AmbiguitiesLanguage and Cognitive Processes, 1996
- On not being led up the garden path: the use of context by the psychological syntax processorPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1985
- Topic, Focus and Local RelevancePublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,1981