Focus Particles in Children's Language: Production and Comprehension of<i>Auch</i>‘Also’ in German Learners from 1 Year to 4 Years of Age

Abstract

Abstract 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 children's 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. Notes 1 There are other meaning variants of auch that we cannot discuss here (e.g., CitationDimroth & Klein 1996). 2 Accented elemen ts are indicated by uppercase letters. 3 The domain of application is indicated by square brackets. 4 One of the reviewers pointed out that the results of the elicitation study might also be due to the children's inability to reproduce the target pattern as presented by the experimenter during the introductory phase of the experiment. In fact, this might have had an impact on the results, but still the question remains why it is harder for the children to reproduce the pattern with the unaccented compared to the accented auch. 5 The onset of the determiner of the object noun phrase was held constant at 2000 ms after the beginning of the visual presentation in all four kinds of sentence conditions. 6 One of the reviewers proposed an additional statistical analysis comparing the fixations to the object and the subject alternative sets when one sentence was presented. The design of our experiment does not allow for such an analysis as the areas of interest corresponding to the subject and the object alternative sets on the visual display are very different in size (see Figure 7). 7 We leave aside the possibility of a secondary accent on preverbal auch (cf., CitationReis & Rosengren 1997), although we would argue that this possibility may be expected under our analysis of unaccented auch as an anaphor which, given its topical nature, should then become contrastive: AUCH hat Tom ein AUTO.