Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
9th International Symposium on Brain and Cognitive Science, İstanbul, Türkiye, 07 Mayıs 2023, ss.71-72
Scope ambiguities complicate language acquisition since children have to acquire a language on the basis of a limited amount of linguistic input. Child language acquisition studies show that when 4-to-5-year-old children are asked to interpret sentences with a scope ambiguity, such as “Every horse didn’t jump over the fence”, they struggle to access the inverse scope interpretation where only some of the horses jumped over the fence (Savinelli et al., 2017). One explanation for this pattern is that young children systematically interpret these utterances on the basis of surface syntax (Musolino, 1998). Although early studies explain children’s scope errors by their syntactic representations (Lidz, 2018), research yielded contradictory findings about children's distributivity bias. Some studies showed children may be able to reach inverse scope interpretations under certain contextual manipulations (Kiss et al., 2013). However, there have been few empirical investigations into how preschoolers combine different constraints to handle this kind of uncertainty. Therefore, it is unclear which sources of information children use to disambiguate these utterances. We examine, for the first time, the effect of syntactic and prosodic information on children’s resolution of scope ambiguities in doubly quantified sentences in Turkish. We employed a sentence-picture matching task adapted from Kırcalı (2020). The experimental sentences were in two conditions with two levels, which led to four types of experimental sentences. We manipulated the order of the quantifier as universal-first (every … a) (e.g., Her çocuk bir kediyi okşadı) or universal-second (a … every) (e.g.., Bir çocuk her kediyi okşadı), and we manipulated the prosodic focus as focus on the existential or universal quantifier. 4-to-5year-old children (Mage = 5:01; N = 54) and adults (Mage = 27,72; N = 108) saw two pictures, each depicting either a narrow or wide-scope reading of the target sentence. Following each prerecorded utterance, they chose one of the two pictures. The accuracy rates were analyzed using ANOVA, which showed that neither adults’ nor children’s preferences for ambiguous sentences in the universal-second order changed with the prosodic information on the quantifier. There was a greater tendency to interpret these sentences as collective. However, we found an effect of focus only in children in the universal-first order. Although they preferred a collective meaning when the existential quantifier was focused, their interpretation became distributive when the universal quantifier was focused. Since previous research suggested children cannot access the inverse scope readings of these ambiguous sentences (Musolino, 1998), this finding was unexpected and shows children’s sensitivity to prosodic cues. However, in adults, there was a greater tendency to interpret the universal-first order sentences as distributive regardless of the focus. This study shows that prosodic information can facilitate children’s realization of alternative meanings in scopally ambiguous sentences. Since this effect only emerged in sentences with the universal-first order, this aligns with those of previous studies highlighting the role of linearity in disambiguation (Filik et al., 2004). As to why adults did not show sensitivity to prosody, we conjecture that they may be over-focusing on syntactic information in a manner masking their sensitivity to prosodic information in syntactically tasking structures, which was also attested in previous child-adult comparative studies (Wiedmann & Winkler, 2015).