Publications

Publication details [#54599]

Müller, Andreas P., Petra Schulz, Barbara Höhle and Anja Müller. 2011. Pragmatic children. How German children interpret sentences with and without the focus particle only. In Meibauer, Jörg and Markus Steinbach, eds. Experimental Pragmatics/Semantics. (Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today 175). John Benjamins.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

This study investigated the abilities of 6-year-old German-speaking children to interpret sentences with and without the focus particle nur (only). It reports two experiments: In Experiment 1 the study by Paterson et al. (2003) on English was replicated in German. It was found that German-speaking children do not interpret only-sentences target-like. This supports Paterson et al. that children ignore information that is not verbally given. The second experiment investigated children’s pragmatic ability to judge underinformative sentences. The results indicate that children take into account information that is showed on a picture, but not verbally introduced. It is argued that children’s performance in Experiment 1 is not caused by an insufficient pragmatic knowledge but rather to its methodological set up.