Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles.

Full 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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Author information

Author/s: Paterson, Kevin B (KB); Liversedge, Simon P (SP); Rowland, Caroline (C); Filik, Ruth (R);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article

Journal: Cognition (Cognition), published in Netherlands. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Oct; vol 89 (issue 3) : pp 263-94

Dates: Created 2003/09/09; Completed 2003/10/21; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12963264, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Child
Cognition
Female
Humans

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