Children's interpretation of ambiguous focus in sentences with "only"

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, and Conway (1994)).