Real-time comprehension of connectives by preschool children and adults

Elizabeth Swanson (University of Maryland, College Park)
Hugh Rabagliati (University of Edinburgh)
Alex de Carvalho (CNRS)

Connectives such as but and so appear frequently in both adult and child speech, but questions remain about the kind of meaning they contribute to an utterance and how listeners may draw on this information during real-time language comprehension. We report the results of two eye-tracking experiments in which children and adults listened to French sentences containing so or but and a novel word, such as “Anna a eu de la soupe au déjeuner, [alors/mais] elle a utilisé une bamoule” (“Anna had soup for lunch, [so/but] she used a bamoule”). Simultaneously, participants viewed pairs of images—one semantically associated with the initial context (e.g., a spoon) and one contrasting with the initial context (e.g., a fork). Participants’ eye gaze and explicit pointing responses were recorded. Results indicate that adults and children as young as 4 are sensitive to the difference between so and but during incremental processing, as they looked and pointed significantly more at the associated image on so trials than on but trials. However, the contrastive inference invited by but appears to be fragile for children and potentially sensitive to the Question Under Discussion in adults.