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Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles

Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles
Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles
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.
0010-0277
263-294
Paterson, K.B
89784875-8bd1-497f-9b5e-1e915bc98167
Liversedge, S.P
3ebda3f3-d930-4f89-85d5-5654d8fe7dee
Rowland, C
eb123a28-437d-42e6-9a52-3b4c43c1957c
Filik, R
2291e9a4-b21d-49d4-9f17-2f2c32674155
Paterson, K.B
89784875-8bd1-497f-9b5e-1e915bc98167
Liversedge, S.P
3ebda3f3-d930-4f89-85d5-5654d8fe7dee
Rowland, C
eb123a28-437d-42e6-9a52-3b4c43c1957c
Filik, R
2291e9a4-b21d-49d4-9f17-2f2c32674155

Paterson, K.B, Liversedge, S.P, Rowland, C and Filik, R (2003) Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles. Cognition, 89 (3), 263-294. (doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00126-4).

Record type: Article

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.

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Published date: October 2003

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 44643
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/44643
ISSN: 0010-0277
PURE UUID: d56bb2fc-a922-47a0-ab69-9d74c0ac74f4

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Date deposited: 07 Mar 2007
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 09:06

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Contributors

Author: K.B Paterson
Author: S.P Liversedge
Author: C Rowland
Author: R Filik

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