TY  - JOUR
A1  - Szendroi, Kriszta
A1  - Bernard, Carline
A1  - Berger, Frauke
A1  - Gervain, Judit
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds
JF  - Journal of child language
N2  - Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages.
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000917000071
SN  - 0305-0009
SN  - 1469-7602
VL  - 45
IS  - 1
SP  - 219
EP  - 241
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Szendrői, Kriszta
A1  - Schumacher, Rebecca
A1  - Fritzsche, Tom
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Acquisition of quantifier raising of a universal across an existential
BT  - Evidence from German
JF  - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2  - Our paper reports an act out task with German 5- and 6-year olds and adults involving doubly-quantified sentences with a universal object and an existential subject. We found that 5- and 6-year olds allow inverse scope in such sentences, while adults do not. Our findings contribute to a growing body of research (e.g. Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino 2009, etc.) showing that children are more flexible in their scopal considerations than initially proposed by the Isomorphism proposal (Lidz & Musolino 2002; Musolino & Lidz 2006). This result provides support for a theory of German, a “no quantifier raising”-language, in terms of soft violable constraints, or global economy terms (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012), rather than in terms of hard inviolable constraints or rules (Frey 1993). Finally, the results are compatible with Reinhart’s (2004) hypothesis that children do not perform global interface economy considerations due to the increased processing associated with it.
KW  - quantifier raising
KW  - language development
KW  - inverse scope reading
KW  - German language
KW  - interface economy
Y1  - 2017
SN  - 2397-1835
VL  - 2
PB  - Open Library of Humanities
CY  - London
ER  -