The Role of the Focus OperatorOnlyin Children's Computation of Sentence Meaning
Utako Minai, Robert Fiorentino · Language Acquisition · 2010
Research on children's computation of meanings involving the focus operator only has provided an equivocal conclusion as to whether children's semantic representation of only is adult-like. The present study discusses the importance of assessing children's knowledge about only in light of its semantic interaction with other logical words in a sentence. The meaning of only involves two components, each of which affects the interpretation of another logical word, such as the scalar term some, in a sentence containing only. Demonstrating that young children are sensitive to the interaction among only and some would suggest that children possess adult-like knowledge of the lexical semantics of only. We report a new experiment that examines children's interpretation of sentences involving only and some, revealing that children indeed do not ignore the contribution of only when interpreting sentences with only and some.