Anja Müller

Focus Particles in Children's Language: Production and Comprehension of Auch 'Also' in German Learners from 1 Year to 4 Years of Age

This article investigates the acquisition of the focus particle auch ‘also’ by German-learning children. We report data from spontaneous and elicited production of utterances with the focus particle auch by 1- to 4-year-olds complementing earlier findings of a delayed production of the unaccented auch compared to the accented one. But in contrast to previous studies showing that children have problems interpreting sentences with accented and unaccented auch, we found indications for adult-like comprehension in an eye-tracking experiment by children from 3 years on. These results reflect early availability of adult-like linguistic competence with respect to both auch-variants which does not always lead to adult-like performance. This variation in childrens performance across tasks is considered to be due to additional modality and task specific constraints. Development in this area thus reflects not a change in underlying knowledge, but rather a change in the constraints on its behavioral manifestation.

Information structural constraints on children’s early language production: The acquisition of the focus particle auch (‘also’) in German-learning 12- to 36-month-olds

This article presents new findings for the acquisition of the focus particle auch (‘also’) in German-learning children. In a longitudinal study with 11 children between 1;00 and 3;00 years of age complemented by two experiments with children aged 2;4 and 2;8, the authors investigated children’s production of the accented and unaccented auch. The results confirm earlier findings of a temporal delay between the first occurrences of both auch-variants. Based on the empirical findings, an account for this asymmetry is proposed that relates it to a more general developmental tendency that is characterized by a growing linguistic explicitness in embedding a given utterance in its discourse context. It is suggested that the observed delay is caused by the type of relation between the particle and its related constituent: in contrast to the accented auch the unaccented auch is anaphorically related to the sentence topic. It is proposed that the initial omission reflects a general tendency in early child language to drop topic material.

Children’s Comprehension of Sentences with Focus Particles and the Role of Cognitive Control: An Eye Tracking Study with German-Learning 4-Year-Olds

Children’s interpretations of sentences containing focus particles do not seem adult-like until school age. This study investigates how German 4-year-old children comprehend sentences with the focus particle ‘nur’ (only) by using different tasks and controlling for the impact of general cognitive abilities on performance measures. Two sentence types with ‘only’ in either pre-subject or pre-object position were presented. Eye gaze data and verbal responses were collected via the visual world paradigm combined with a sentence-picture verification task. While the eye tracking data revealed an adult-like pattern of focus particle processing, the sentence-picture verification replicated previous findings of poor comprehension, especially for ‘only’ in pre-subject position. A second study focused on the impact of general cognitive abilities on the outcomes of the verification task. Working memory was related to children’s performance in both sentence types whereas inhibitory control was selectively related to the number of errors for sentences with ‘only’ in pre-subject position. These results suggest that children at the age of 4 years have the linguistic competence to correctly interpret sentences with focus particles, which–depending on specific task demands–may be masked by immature general cognitive abilities.