Preschoolers are adult-like in using focus to guide logical scope interpretation: Evidence from Hungarian

It has been argued that focus structure may affect adult speakers’ logical scope interpretation in scopally ambiguous sentences, including examples like (1).

(1) The professor did not fail more than five students.

• a. ‘There aren’t more than five students that the professor failed.’’
• b. ‘There are more than five students that the professor didn’t fail.’

Much recent research suggests that the first language acquisition of information structure in general, and focus in particular, may be a prolonged process, with findings indicating non-adult-like performance at preschool ages, especially in comprehension.
In the work reported here, we investigated preschoolers’ comprehension of focus by testing whether preschool children’s logical scope interpretation is affected by sentence-level focus in the same way as it is for adults. The experiment, conducted with Hungarian preschoolers (n=38; 4;1-6;10) and adult controls (n=38), employed a truth value judgment task using short animations. Critical sentences were Hungarian counterparts of sentences like (2). Such sentences are potentially scope ambiguous, giving rise to a narrow-scope disjunction (=the lamb likes neither) and a wide-scope disjunction reading (=the lamb dislikes one or the other).

(2) The lamb doesn’t like the tangerine or the orange.

Each critical sentence (n=10) was placed in an animation SCENARIO corresponding either to the truth conditions ‘neither of the two’ or to the truth conditions ‘one of the two,’ and was uttered either with neutral IS or with focused-negation IS. Both adult controls’ and children’s results showed highly significant interaction between SCENARIO and IS, according to analysis in glm. Focus on negation shifted response rates in the same direction from the neutral-IS baseline to a similar extent across the two Age Groups in both scenarios: towards more acceptances in the ‘neither of the two’ scenario and towards more rejections in the ‘one of the two’ scenario (accordingly, the SCENARIO x IS interaction did not differ across Age Groups). These results strongly suggest that preschool children already have the competence to process prosodically marked focus in comprehension, and they can exploit it in an adult-like manner to guide logical scope interpretation. This, in turn, supports the conjecture that the failure of many previous experiments to reveal preschoolers’ adult-like interpretation of focus-marking stems not from children’s underdeveloped receptive competence with focus per se, but from other, task-dependent factors.

The zoom-link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4526127048
Meeting ID: 452 612 7048