Examining children's sensitivity to morphologically-marked focus in the comprehension of question sentences: evidence from quantifier comprehension in child Turkish

This study investigated the role of morphologically-marked focus in child language comprehension. The Turkish question particle (QP) mI typically appears at the end of a question sentence, but can also appear in other positions, attaching to an element to be focalized and marking it as the most important information conveyed in the sentence. For example, if a question sentence meaning "Is the child holding a balloon?" has the QP on the subject noun ("the child"), it is focalized, rendering an interpretation similar to a cleft construction (e.g., "Is it the child that is holding a balloon?"). We investigated whether Turkish-speaking preschool-age children can incorporate focus marked by QP placement by testing sentences containing a universal quantifier her ("every") in two conditions: questions with the QP appearing sentence-finally (yielding a reading like "Is every child holding a balloon?"), and those with the QP on the universally-quantified subject, focalizing it (yielding an "Is it every child that is holding a balloon?" reading). We presented the sentences along with an "extra object" picture depicting children holding a balloon each and an extra balloon held by nobody, a context known to elicit "q-spreading" (erroneous "No" answers attributed to the presence of the extra balloon), to examine whether focus-marking on the subject would facilitate adult-like interpretation ("Yes" answers verifying the children all have balloons). Children indeed exhibited significantly less q-spreading when the quantified subject contained focus-marking, suggesting that children utilize morphologically-marked focus during comprehension, consistent with "full competence" approaches to focus and quantification.