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Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children’s comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an essentially identical logical structure, have been argued to stem not from the lack of their competence to compute the implicature itself, but from their immature contextualization abilities to identify relevant scalar alternatives. We address the question whether the same extraneous factor may underlie preschooler’s difficulties with focus exhaustification in a comprehension study of 5- to 6-year-old Hungarian children which investigated the effect of contextual cues on their focus interpretation. It was found that while the presence of an explicit Question Under Discussion significantly raises children’s accuracy in identifying the focus and its alternatives (sub-experiment 1), it fails to induce a similar increase in the proportion of exhaustive interpretations (sub-experiment 2). These results indicate that, in contrast to the case of scalar implicatures, children’s low rate of exhaustification of focus reflects a deeper, less context-dependent difference from adult-like comprehension, possibly rooted in the linguistic representation of focus exhaustivity.

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like comprehension of prosodic focus-marking should be delayed in comparison to the Germanic and Romance languages investigated previously using the same experimental method that we adopted. Our results, confirming this prediction, suggest that the developmental trajectory of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking may be substantially affected by cross-linguistic grammatical variation in the marking of focus.

Összefoglaló. A Treacher Collins-szindróma a mandibulofacialis dysostosisok csoportjába tartozó kórkép. Főbb jellegzetességei a maxillaris és mandibularis dysostosis, az antimongoloid szemrések, az alsó szemhéj colobomája, illetve a vezetéses halláscsökkenés. A szindrómával járó tünetek egyénenként és családon belül is nagyon eltérőek lehetnek; legenyhébb formái csaknem észrevehetetlenek, míg a súlyosabb esetekben az életet veszélyeztető légúti szövődmények léphetnek fel. Hátterében az esetek döntő többségében a TCOF1-gén eltérései játszanak szerepet, mely eltérések autoszomális domináns módon öröklődnek. Esetbemutatásunk célja, hogy felhívjuk a figyelmet a genetikai vizsgálat elvégzésének fontosságára olyan, klinikailag jól felismerhető tünetegyüttes, mint a Treacher Collins-szindróma esetén. Bár a betegség a klinikai kép alapján diagnosztizálható, az ismétlődés kockázatát csak úgy tudjuk pontosan meghatározni, ha ismerjük a családtagok genotípusát. A bemutatott család több tagjánál kimutatható volt a TCOF1-gén mutációja, annak ellenére, hogy klinikai tünetük nem volt. A jelenség magyarázata az inkomplett penetrancia, azaz a hibás gén fenotípusosan nem kerül kifejeződésre. Orv Hetil. 2020; 161(52): 2201–2205. Summary. Treacher Collins syndrome belongs to the group of mandibulofacial dysostoses. Its main features are maxillary and mandibular dysostosis, downward-slanting palpebral fissures, coloboma of the lower eyelid and conductive hearing loss. The symptoms associated with the syndrome can vary greatly from individual to individual and within the family. In its mildest form, the syndrome is almost imperceptible, and when severe, life-threatening respiratory complication can occur. TCOF1 is the major gene involved with an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance. The purpose of our case study is to draw attention to the importance of performing genetic testing in a clinically recognizable disorder such as Treacher Collins syndrome. Although the disease can be diagnosed based on the clinical symptoms, the risk of recurrence can only be accurately determined if the genotype of the family members is known. Several members of the presented family had a mutation in the TCOF1 gene despite having no clinical symptoms. The explanation for this phenomenon is incomplete penetrance, i.e., the defective gene is not expressed in the phenotype. Orv Hetil. 2020; 161(52): 2201–2205.

The computation of scalar implicatures based on the scale 〈some, all〉 represents a problem for children. This paper argues that the source of children’s difficulties with interpreting ‘some’ is that it is ambiguous; it has a non-partitive interpretation, corresponding to ‘a few’, which forms a scale with non-partitive ‘many’, and a partitive reading, corresponding to ‘a subset of’, which forms a scale with ‘all’. The two readings have different distributions; they are selected by different predicates, and in Hungarian, they occur in different structural positions. We tested and confirmed the hypothesis that young children are not sensitive to the partitivity feature of ‘some’-phrases; they first acquire the non-partitive reading, which they overgeneralize for a while. Experiment 1, a forced choice task, showed that the default reading of ‘some’ NPs for six-year olds is the ‘a few’ interpretation. Exper- iment 2, a truth value judgement task, demonstrated that children also accept the ‘not all’ interpretation of ‘some’, and the acceptance rates of the ‘a few’ and the ‘not all’ readings are similar irrespective of the partitivity feature of the given NP. &nbsp

In English, a sentence like “The cat didn’t eat the carrot or the pepper” typicallyreceives a “neither” interpretation; in Japanese it receives a “not this or notthat” interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation,such that the “neither” interpretation (strong reading) asymmetricallyentails the “not this or not that” interpretation (weak reading). This asymmetricalentailment raises a learnability problem. According to the SemanticSubset Principle, all language learners, regardless of the language they areexposed to, start by assigning the strong reading, since this interpretationmakes such sentences true in the narrowest range of circumstances.). If the“neither” interpretation is children’s initial hypothesis, then children acquiringa superset language will be able to revise their initial hypothesis on thebasis of positive evidence.The aim of the present study is to test an additional account proposed byPagliarini, Crain, Guasti (2018) as a possible explanation for the earlier convergence to the adult grammar by Italian children. The hypothesis testedhere is that the presence of a lexical form such as recursive né that unambiguously conveys a “neither” meaning, would lead children to convergeearlier to the adult grammar due to a blocking e!ect of the recursive né formin the inventory of negated disjunction forms in a language. We compareddata from Italian (taken from Pagliarini, Crain, Guasti, 2018), French,Hungarian and Dutch. Dutch was tested as baseline language. French andHungarian have – similarly to Italian – a lexical form that unambiguouslyexpresses the “neither” interpretation (ni ni and sem sem, respectively). Ourresults did not support this hypothesis however, and are discussed in thelight of language-specifc particularities of the syntax and semantics ofnegation.

Összefoglaló. A Treacher Collins-szindróma a mandibulofacialis dysostosisok csoportjába tartozó kórkép. Főbb jellegzetességei a maxillaris és mandibularis dysostosis, az antimongoloid szemrések, az alsó szemhéj colobomája, illetve a vezetéses halláscsökkenés. A szindrómával járó tünetek egyénenként és családon belül is nagyon eltérőek lehetnek; legenyhébb formái csaknem észrevehetetlenek, míg a súlyosabb esetekben az életet veszélyeztető légúti szövődmények léphetnek fel. Hátterében az esetek döntő többségében a TCOF1-gén eltérései játszanak szerepet, mely eltérések autoszomális domináns módon öröklődnek. Esetbemutatásunk célja, hogy felhívjuk a figyelmet a genetikai vizsgálat elvégzésének fontosságára olyan, klinikailag jól felismerhető tünetegyüttes, mint a Treacher Collins-szindróma esetén. Bár a betegség a klinikai kép alapján diagnosztizálható, az ismétlődés kockázatát csak úgy tudjuk pontosan meghatározni, ha ismerjük a családtagok genotípusát. A bemutatott család több tagjánál kimutatható volt a TCOF1-gén mutációja, annak ellenére, hogy klinikai tünetük nem volt. A jelenség magyarázata az inkomplett penetrancia, azaz a hibás gén fenotípusosan nem kerül kifejeződésre. Orv Hetil. 2020; 161(52): 2201-2205. Summary. Treacher Collins syndrome belongs to the group of mandibulofacial dysostoses. Its main features are maxillary and mandibular dysostosis, downward-slanting palpebral fissures, coloboma of the lower eyelid and conductive hearing loss. The symptoms associated with the syndrome can vary greatly from individual to individual and within the family. In its mildest form, the syndrome is almost imperceptible, and when severe, life-threatening respiratory complication can occur. TCOF1 is the major gene involved with an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance. The purpose of our case study is to draw attention to the importance of performing genetic testing in a clinically recognizable disorder such as Treacher Collins syndrome. Although the disease can be diagnosed based on the clinical symptoms, the risk of recurrence can only be accurately determined if the genotype of the family members is known. Several members of the presented family had a mutation in the TCOF1 gene despite having no clinical symptoms. The explanation for this phenomenon is incomplete penetrance, i.e., the defective gene is not expressed in the phenotype. Orv Hetil. 2020; 161(52): 2201-2205.

The paper reports on three experiments in which the exhaustive interpretation of sentences containing the focus particle csak ‘only’, structural focus constructions, and sentences with neutral intonation and word order were investigated. The results obtained not only reveal the developmental trajectory of the adult-like comprehension of each sentence type, but also contribute to the discussion concerning the semantic or pragmatic nature of their exhaustive meaning component. As the three construction types were judged in different ways on a three-point scale, the findings appear to support the hypothesis according to which exhaustivity is part of the asserted content of sentences with csak ‘only’, it is context-independently presupposed in the case of structural focus, and in certain contexts it can arise as an implicature in the case of neutral utterances, as well.