The acquisition of additive focus particles: Children's understanding of their presuppositional and focus-sensitive nature

Abstract

Previous comprehension studies on the acquisition of additive particles report that children’s understanding of the presuppositional nature of additive particles begins emerging around age 3 but children do not come to understand the focus-sensitive nature of additive particles until much later, possibly after preschool years. These studies, however, involve methodological confounds that could have affected children’s performance, which might obscure our assessment of children’s linguistic capacity. To better understand what children really know about additive particles, it is necessary that we examine whether previous studies underestimate/overestimate children’s performance, because only then can we be confident that our assessment of children’s linguistic capacity is accurate and precise.In light of the above discussion, this dissertation devotes itself to exploring the acquisition of the English additive particles also and too, and their Japanese counterpart mo ‘also/too’. The dissertation presents findings from four experimental studies, which were conducted with the aim of better understanding how English- and Japanese-acquiring preschoolers come to acquire the presuppositional and focus-sensitive nature of the respective particle(s) in their target language. Experiment 1, Experiment 2, and Experiment 3 examine English- and Japanese-acquiring children’s understanding of the presuppositional nature of additive particles by testing to see if they can differentiate sentences with also/too/mo from those without. The experiments were conducted using a novel task that was designed to test children’s interpretation of sentences containing an additive particle in its naturally occurring context, without having to rely on truth-verification. The results from these experiments provide an important steppingstone for testing children’s understanding of too’ focus-sensitive nature in Experiment 4. Using a novel task that takes on the form of Guess Who? game, Experiment 4 examines children’s understanding of the focus-sensitive nature of additive particles by testing to see if they are able to discern sentences containing a subject-associated too from sentences containing an object-associated too. Together, these experiments contribute novel findings to the acquisition literature. In addition to the four experiments, the dissertation also presents a supplementary corpus study, which was conducted with the aim of examining whether any evidence for too’s presuppositional and focus-sensitive nature exists in child input. The results from the corpus study provide valuable insights about how children might come to acquire the meaning of additive particles.