Abstract
Certain sentences with only would be ambiguous were it not for a prosodic accent indicating which constituent is associated with the focus particle. These sentences thus provide an opportunity to investigate whether children map semantic and prosodic information. While children up to at least eight years of age do not
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always interpret sentences with only correctly, recent eye-tracking studies seem to indicate that children initially process the sentences in an adultlike manner (Höhle et al., 2016; Zhou et al., 2012). Employing a combined truth-value judgement and Visual World Paradigm experiment, we investigated Dutch 7-year-olds processing of sentences like Ik heb alleen BANANEN aan de ASTRONAUT gegeven ‘I only gave BANANAS to the astronaut’ (involving Early Stress) and Ik heb alleen bananen aan de ASTRONAUT gegeven ‘I only gave bananas to the ASTRONAUT’ (involving Late Stress). The study comprised four experimental conditions. Two conditions (the ES3 and LS3 condition) were designed to test the response accuracy in relation to accent placement. The other two conditions (the ES2 and LS2 condition) were designed to test the theory that children’s difficulty follows from an inability to perform reference set computation, a nonlocal computation suggested to be essential (Reinhart, 2003). Eye gaze patterns were compared for the ES3 and LS3 condition and for the ES2 and LS2 condition. A flanker task was conducted to acquire a measure of inhibitory control (cf. Höhle et al., 2016). We found that response accuracy on the LS3 condition increased as a function of age. We suggest that participants, due to underdeveloped pragmatic skills, provided responses based on interpretations without only, with this having been less of an issue for those closer to the age of eight (cf. Paterson et al., 2003). Participants also provided non-adultlike responses on the ES3 condition, but such errors could not be explained by the selection of interpretations without only as they would then provide the correct response. As they performed close to ceiling level on the ES2 and LS2 conditions, difficulty on the ES3 condition was also not due to an inability to perform reference set computation and instead appeared to be due to the incorrect selection of Late Stress interpretations. Visual analysis of the eye gaze patterns (cf. Mulders & Szendrői, 2016) did not suggest correct initial processing. We therefore propose that Dutch 7-year-olds, aside from struggling due to underdeveloped pragmatic skills, truly experience difficulty mapping the prosodic focus to the semantic representations of the sentences. Such difficulty was not related to inhibitory control abilities.
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