The Processing Cost of Reference Set Computation: Acquisition of Stress Shift and Focus
Tanya Reinhart · Language Acquisition · 2004
Reference set computation-the construction of a (global) comparison set to determine whether a given derivation is appropriate in context-comes with a processing cost. I argue that this cost is directly visible at the acquisition stage: In those linguistic areas in which it has been independently established that such computation is indeed at work, experiments have consistently found group performance at the range of 50% (in dual-choice tasks). The proposed explanation is that children are aware of the innately required computation, but they cannot carry it out because of their limited working-memory resources, and they resort instead to strategies that enable bypassing it. Previous studies have established already the 50% range of performance in the acquisition of 2 areas requiring reference set computation-coreference (Condition B) and implicatures. In this study, I examine the acquisition of stress shift and focus. I argue that computing the focus obtained by stress shift requires constructing a comparison set. Contrary to some prevailing views, there is no evidence that children have general problems with stress, but still, one finds the 50% range of performance when stress shift applies as predicted by the processing cost hypothesis. Analysis of the explanations children give for their answers has revealed that they are attempting to construct the relevant comparison derivation, but they get stuck at that stage. Combined with the analysis of individual responses, 2 bypassing strategies are found in this area: One is simple guessing, dominant in tasks involving switch reference with stress shift in which one finds individual performance at the range of 50%. The other, dominant in tasks involving semantic disambiguation, is the selection of an arbitrary default, which may be fixed for a given child across tasks. However, because the choice of the default is itself arbitrary, the group results remain at the 50% range.