Preschoolers' Comprehension of Exhaustive Focus: The Role of Contextualization

Autor/inn/en	Pintér, Lilla; Surányi, Balázs
Titel	Preschoolers' Comprehension of Exhaustive Focus: The Role of Contextualization
Quelle	In: First Language, 43 (2023) 1, S.58-90 (33 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Pintér, Lilla)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0142-7237
DOI	10.1177/01427237221113962
Schlagwörter	Preschool Children; Language Processing; Language Acquisition; Accuracy; Inferences; Syntax; Difficulty Level; Hungarian; Cues; Context Effect; Foreign Countries; Identification; Intonation; Suprasegmentals; Semantics; Task Analysis; Decision Making; Value Judgment; Error Correction; Comparative Analysis; Pictorial Stimuli; Hungary + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Pre-school age; Preschool age; Child; Children; Pre-school education; Preschool education; Vorschulalter; Kind; Kinder; Vorschulkind; Vorschulkinder; Vorschulerziehung; Vorschule; Sprachverarbeitung; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Inference; Inferenz; Schwierigkeitsgrad; Ungar; Ungarisch; Stichwort; Ausland; Identifikation; Identifizierung; Semantik; Aufgabenanalyse; Decision-making; Entscheidungsfindung; Werturteil; Korrektur; Fantasieanregung; Ungarn
Abstract	Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an essentially identical logical structure, have been argued to stem not from the lack of their competence to compute the implicature itself, but from their immature contextualization abilities to identify relevant scalar alternatives. We address the question whether the same extraneous factor may underlie preschooler's difficulties with focus exhaustification in a comprehension study of 5- to 6-year-old Hungarian children which investigated the effect of contextual cues on their focus interpretation. It was found that while the presence of an explicit Question Under Discussion significantly raises children's accuracy in identifying the focus and its alternatives (sub-experiment 1), it fails to induce a similar increase in the proportion of exhaustive interpretations (sub-experiment 2). These results indicate that, in contrast to the case of scalar implicatures, children's low rate of exhaustification of focus reflects a deeper, less context-dependent difference from adult-like comprehension, possibly rooted in the linguistic representation of focus exhaustivity. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01