Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Jan 17;14(1):e0209670. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0209670. eCollection 2019.
In many offline studies, children show selectively better comprehension of sentences with the focus particle only when it modifies the object argument (Jane only ate an apple) than they do when it modifies the subject argument (Only Jane ate an apple). Here we explore the nature of this asymmetry by examining performance in a different kind of task: the moment-to-moment comprehension of unambiguous sentences. If past errors reflect a fundamental difference in representation or complexity of computation, we would expect the same asymmetry in this task. We observed that adults were able to successfully predict the target referent for both types of only-sentences, as indicated by anticipatory looks, while 6- to 8-year-old children could do so only for subject-modifying only-sentences. These findings suggest that much of the asymmetry in past work may be due to task demands. We discuss the implications of these results for children's syntactic and pragmatic development.
在许多离线研究中，儿童在仅修饰宾语的焦点粒子句（如“Jane 只吃了一个苹果”）中的理解表现要好于仅修饰主语的焦点粒子句（如“只有 Jane 吃了一个苹果”）。在此，我们通过考察不同类型任务中的表现来探究这种不对称性：即对明确句的即时理解。如果过去的错误反映了在表示或计算复杂性方面的根本差异，那么我们预计在这个任务中也会出现同样的不对称性。我们观察到，成年人能够成功预测这两种类型的仅修饰主语的焦点粒子句的目标指称，表现为有预期性的注视，而 6 至 8 岁的儿童只能预测到仅修饰主语的焦点粒子句的目标指称。这些发现表明，过去工作中的大部分不对称性可能是由于任务要求所致。我们讨论了这些结果对儿童句法和语用发展的影响。
