Children's enrichments of conjunctive sentences in context
Résumé
An utterance conjoining two propositions with and often conveys more information than the sum of its parts. Consider how a truth-table analysis would show that Mary got pregnant and got married is equivalent to Mary got pregnant and got married; in conversation, the order of the two conjuncts matters much more. We present three experiments that investigate both the development and on-line processing of pragmatic enrichments linked to and by presenting story-vignettes, each concerning a short series of events, to ten-year-olds and adults. Critical were two types of a comprehension question: One that conjoined two events in their order of appearance and one that inverted the two events. Results show that (a) children are generally more likely than adults to respond affirmatively to invertedorder questions; b) as events are made more salient in the story, children's pragmatic enrichments in response to the test-questions increase and; (c) inverted-order questions are linked with extra reading time for both children and adults, but not necessarily for the same reason. These data are taken to show that and sentences are initially processed among children in a minimal fashion and that developmental effects reflect how pragmatic enrichments as well as metalinguistic analyses require further effort in processing these sentences.
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