On the Acquisition of Polarity Items: 11- to 12-Year-Olds' Comprehension of German NPIs and PPIs

Abstract

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children’s language input. In this paper, we report an experimental investigation on children’s comprehension of two NPIs and two PPIs in German. Based on corpus data indicating that the four tested PSIs are present in child-directed speech but rare in young children’s utterances, we conducted an auditory rating task with adults and 11- to 12-year-old children. The results demonstrate that, even at 11–12 years of age, children do not yet show a completely target-like comprehension of the investigated PSIs. While they are adult-like in their responses to one of the tested NPIs, their responses did not demonstrate a categorical distinction between licensed and unlicensed PSI uses for the other tested expressions. The effect was led by a higher acceptance of sentences containing unlicensed PSIs, indicating a lack of awareness for their distributional restrictions. The results of our study pose new questions for the developmental time scale of the acquisition of polarity items.

Lexical variation in NPI illusions – A case study of German jemals 'ever' and so recht 'really'

“…Conversely, the acceptance of ungrammatical conditions was also higher for so recht compared to jemals. Similar findings have been reported by Schwab et al (2021), which they attribute to the pragmatics of attenuating/strengthening NPIs: Whereas unlicensed strengthening NPIs, in the scalar framework, result in contradictions due to the uninformativeness of the assertion, unlicensed attenuating NPIs result in assertions that are more informative than their alternatives (e.g. Mary is all that happy, which entails alternative propositions with lower degrees of happiness).…”

“…In addition, licensed uses of so recht were generally accepted to a lower degree than licensed uses of jemals. On the one hand, this may reflect the fact that so recht generally disprefers negative quantifiers as licensor; however, this possibility seems less likely given that previous studies suggest that negative quantifiers are highly accepted as licensors of this NPI (Schaebbicke et al, 2021;Schwab et al, 2021). On the other hand, it may reflect issues with the stimulus design, such that some of the (grammatical) materials may have been less plausible with a degree modifier like so recht than with a temporal adverbial like jemals, therefore getting rejected by participants.…”

“…In principle, the empirical results may therefore relate to differences between these two NPIs that have nothing to do with their strengthening or attenuating nature, although care was taken to match the tested NPIs as closely as possible. Jemals, for instance, is more frequent and appears to be acquired earlier during childhood than so recht (see Schwab et al, 2021, for corpus and experimental data on their frequency and acquisition). Although such differences have not been discussed with respect to the NPI illusion so far (and will not play a role in my account), they deserve attention in future investigations.…”

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods

“…Likewise, in psycho- and neurolinguistics, research into real-time language processing in context has for a long time focused on the processing of standard language in the population, and the latter was equated implicitly with 18–31 year-old students in formal lab situations. But over the past two decades, investigations have also begun to broaden out to other language user groups among them children and adolescents (Schwab et al, 2021 ), mid-age adults (Huettig and Janse, 2015 ), older adults (Federmeier and Kutas, 2005 ; Maquate and Knoeferle, 2021 ; Adli, 2022 ), illiterates (Mishra et al, 2012 ; Huettig et al, 2018 ), and second language learners (Osterhout et al, 2008 ; McLaughlin et al, 2010 ; Ito et al, 2018 ). Drawing on these and other insights from psycholinguistic research, accounts of situated language processing have begun to include language user characteristics to model the observed inter-individual variability (Jannedy and Weirich, 2014 ; Münster and Knoeferle, 2018 ; Weirich et al, 2020 ).…”