The Role of the Focus Operator Only in Children's Computation of Sentence Meaning

Abstract

Research on children's computation of meanings involving the focus operator only has provided an equivocal conclusion as to whether children's semantic representation of only is adult-like. The present study discusses the importance of assessing children's knowledge about only in light of its semantic interaction with other logical words in a sentence. The meaning of only involves two components, each of which affects the interpretation of another logical word, such as the scalar term some, in a sentence containing only. Demonstrating that young children are sensitive to the interaction among only and some would suggest that children possess adult-like knowledge of the lexical semantics of only. We report a new experiment that examines children's interpretation of sentences involving only and some, revealing that children indeed do not ignore the contribution of only when interpreting sentences with only and some.

Notes

¹While the status of the second component is relatively uncontroversial, there is debate regarding the status of the first (e.g., Horn 1969, 1996; von Fintel 1999; Atlas 1993, 1996; Herburger 2000; see Beaver & Clark 2008 for more discussion). We do not aim to argue for either position in this debate.

² Miller et al. (2005) pointed out that the “not all” interpretation is strongly enforced if some receives focal stress in the utterance. They also reported that children are able to calculate two interpretations of some, depending on whether it is stressed (the “not all” interpretation) or unstressed (the interpretation also consistent with an “all” outcome), contrary to previous research reporting children's failure to calculate this scalar implicature (e.g., Chierchia et al. 2001; Noveck 2001; Papafragou & Musolino 2003). In the present study, we test for children's sensitivity to differences in the interpretation of some by manipulating the presence or the absence of only, rather than the presence or the absence of emphatic stress on some. Thus, in order to minimize prosodic factors such as emphatic stress that may affect children's interpretation of some, the puppeteer (a trained linguist who is a native speaker of English) uttered the stimulus sentences without emphatically stressing some (the puppeteer provided relatively even, nonemphatic stress on both only and some, and avoided placing focal stress on the head noun). However, we did not conduct any acoustic analyses of the puppeteer's production. An anonymous reviewer pointed out the importance of the role of prosody in focus phrases, raising the issue of prosodic prominence in the only some phrases; in only some phrases, some would naturally receive prominence, presumably marked by prosodic factors such as pitch rise, duration, or intensity (for discussion, see Beaver et al., 2007). We note that future work parametrically manipulating the stress patterns and the presence/absence of only would be important for advancing our understanding of the roles of prosody, the focus operator, and their interaction in deriving these meanings.

³ The complete script for a sample trial is provided in Appendix A. A list of all the stimulus sentences used in the experiment, in the order of presentation, is provided in Appendix B.

⁴Response data from each individual participant are included in Table C1 in Appendix C; averaged percentages of ‘yes’ responses per target item by age group are illustrated in Table C2.