Comprehension of degree modifiers by pre-school children: What does it mean to be ‘a bit cold’?

Abstract

Although even young infants were shown to have some understanding of (adjectival) scalarity, studies of children’s spontaneous speech suggest that the acquisition of scalar semantics may not yet be completed by the time children enter primary school. In the present study, this hypothesis is tested by investigating the comprehension of diminishers (‘a bit’) and consequential degree modifiers (‘too’) modifying relative adjectives (long, warm) in a group of 5-year-old Dutch-speaking children. Based on earlier production studies, it is hypothesized that by age 6 children are adult-like in their comprehension of ‘too’ and not yet target-like in the comprehension of ‘a bit’ modifying relative adjectives. The results of the comprehension experiment demonstrate that some children have already acquired the semantics of both ‘too’ and ‘a bit’, whereas others still have trouble understanding combinations of relative adjectives with each of these degree adverbs. Furthermore, poor comprehenders need more time to process sentences with ‘a bit’ compared to the same sentences with ‘too’, presumably revealing a greater conceptual complexity of diminishers. These findings are consistent with the idea that the acquisition of scalarity has a protracted time course