An eye-tracking study examining the role of question-answer congruency in children’s comprehension of only: A preliminary report

Lauren Covey ,Caitlin E Coughlin ,Utako Minai

doi:10.17161/1808.26856

Abstract

‘Crain’s puzzle’ is a term that has been used to describe children’s difficulty comprehending the focus operator only when it is in subject position (subject-only), showing a tendency to interpret only as if it preceded the verb phrase instead. While some researchers attribute children’s difficulty to impoverished pragmatics in the discourse (Hackl et al., 2015), others argue that children’s grammar fundamentally differs from adults’ Notley et al. (2009), yielding a debate regarding whether children’s misinterpretation reflects a non-adult-like linguistic representation of only or some computational burden on their processing of meaning. This study addresses this debate by using eye-tracking to examine whether pragmatic felicity guides children’s eye-movements to incorporate the necessary information during processing on par with adults. Following Hackl et al. (2015), we experimentally manipulated whether the prompt question preceding the target sentence is pragmatically congruent or incongruent in felicitously introducing the only-statement in terms of which element in the sentence is focused by only. Emerging findings reveal that pragmatic richness in the discourse affected processing in both adults and children in a condition that was logically false. Results thus far provide support for an account which posits an important role for pragmatics.

Highlights

In examining children’s interpretation of sentences containing the word only in the pre-subject position (e.g., Only Pooh ate an apple), studies have shown that children often interpret these sentences as if only were placed before the verb phrase (VP) instead (e.g., Pooh only ate an apple) (e.g., Crain et al, 1994, 1992)
The Control group looked at the two competitors for the first two time windows; in the third and fourth time windows, this group made more fixations to the ‘incorrect’ competitor object, which would falsify the sentence under a spreading interpretation. These results reveal an important role for discourse pragmatics in the processing of subject-only for adults
Emerging findings from the present study reveal an interesting role for pragmatic felicity in the processing of sentences containing subject-only

Summary

Introduction

In examining children’s interpretation of sentences containing the word only in the pre-subject position (e.g., Only Pooh ate an apple), studies have shown that children often interpret these sentences as if only were placed before the verb phrase (VP) instead (e.g., Pooh only ate an apple) (e.g., Crain et al, 1994, 1992). Other proposals suggest that children’s performance on sentences containing subject-only relates to processing difficulty incurred by pragmatic infelicity (e.g., Hackl et al, 2015). While several studies have examined children’s comprehension of subject-only, most of this work has used offline methods such as truth value judgments. We compare children and adults with respect to both the truth value judgments of sentences with subject-only and the real-time processing of those sentences

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Discussion

Conclusion