The Role of the Focus Operator Only in Children's Computation of Sentence Meaning.

Research on children's computation of meanings involving the focus operator only has provided an equivocal conclusion as to whether children's semantic representation of only is adult-like. The present study discusses the importance of assessing children's knowledge about only in light of its semantic interaction with other logical words in a sentence. The meaning of only involves two components, each of which affects the interpretation of another logical word, such as the scalar term some, in a sentence containing only. Demonstrating that young children are sensitive to the interaction among only and some would suggest that children possess adult-like knowledge of the lexical semantics of only. We report a new experiment that examines children's interpretation of sentences involving only and some, revealing that children indeed do not ignore the contribution of only when interpreting sentences with only and some. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]