Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Date/Time: Monday, May 7, 5:30p
Location: 32-D461
In this talk, I’d like to discuss an experimental design to investigate children’s knowledge about alternative creation in sentences with a focus-sensitive operator “only.” Previous studies (Crain et al. 1994, Paterson et al. 2006) report that children make considerable mistakes when they interpret sentences with pre-subject only, arguing that children interpret only as if it is attached to the VP (Crain et al.), or children just ignore only (Paterson et al.).
This talk points out that their experiments did not provide sufficient contexts that a sentence with only presupposes (“a sentence with only presupposes that the proposition expressed by the prejacent is ranked low among the alternatives,” see Horn 1969), and argues that the solution that children resort to when they face such a presupposition failure is different from that of adults, which results in the high inaccuracy rate with pre-subject only cases. I also discuss the alternative generation system proposed in Fox & Katir (2010).
Series of experimental design to test this hypothesis are presented. The hypothesis predicts that a difference in manner of introducing characters in a picture ((1) vs. (2) for example) will make a significant difference in accuracy rate.
(1) Look, the goose got a balloon and a flag, the cat got a flag, and the frog got a balloon!
Puppet: Only the cat got a flag.(2) Look, the goose and the frog got a balloon, the cat and the goose got a flag!
Puppet: Only the cat got a flag.