Children's insensitivity to contrastive stress in sentences with only

Abstract

IntroductionThis paper investigates the interaction of prosodic information and discourse principles in child language, taking sentences with the focus operator Dilly as a case study.For adults, prosodic information alone can influence the tmthconditional interpretation of (otherwise) ambiguous sentences.However, the findings of two experiments demonstrate that children afC not able to use prosodic information alone to resolve certain ambiguities involving the focus operator ollly.The next section reviews the semantic properties of the focus operator Dilly.Then we review the relevant prior literature on child language, before turning to our own experimental studies.2 The Semantics of ollly Spoken sentences are accompanied by specific rhytlunic patterns and the use and interpretation of utterances are constrained by their rhythmjc pattern.A clear instance of this phenomenon can be seen in the question-answer pair in (I), where the main stress falls on the noun phrase stralVberries.(I) Q: Does 101111like bananas?A: No, John likes stralVberries.Consider the answer in (I), The slress pattern of English assigns prosodic prominence to the rightmost noun phrase strawberries, making the utterance perfeclly felicitous in the dialogue above, The same prosodic pattell1 makes the sentence infelicitous, however, in the following question-answer pair.

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