Children Know the Prosody-Semantic/Pragmatic Link: Experimental Evidence from Rise-Fall-Rise and Scope

Abstract

Children’s comprehension of scope interaction has received much attention especially since Musolino’s (Universal grammar and the acquisition of semantic knowledge: An experimental investigation into the acquisition of quantifier-negation interaction in English, 1998) observation of isomorphism. Many studies report that English-speaking children prefer to assign the surface scope interpretations/isomorphic readings to sentences with multiple quantifiers or a quantifier and a logical operator, especially when there is no contextual support prior to a target sentence which would make one of the readings felicitous. Our set of experiments investigates whether children are sensitive to prosodic cues for scope assignment comparing a falling contour (i.e. neutral contour) and the Rise-Fall-Rise (RFR) contour, which in the literature has been argued to lead to the inverse scope interpretation (Jackendoff in Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1972; Buring in Linguist Philos 20: 175–194, 1997; Constant in Linguist Philos 35: 407–442, 2012; Contrastive topics: Meanings and realizations, 2014; a.o.). The results show that children are keenly sensitive to the difference between the two intonational patterns, and that they strongly associate the RFR contour with the inverse scope interpretation just like adults do.