Children and adults successfully comprehend subject-only sentences online

In many offline studies, children show selectively better comprehension of sentences with the focus particle only when it modifies the object argument (Jane only ate an apple) than they do when it modifies the subject argument (Only Jane ate an apple). Here we explore the nature of this asymmetry by examining performance in a different kind of task: the moment-to-moment comprehension of unambiguous sentences. If past errors reflect a fundamental difference in representation or complexity of computation, we would expect the same asymmetry in this task. We observed that adults were able to successfully predict the target referent for both types of only-sentences, as indicated by anticipatory looks, while 6- to 8-year-old children could do so only for subject-modifying only-sentences. These findings suggest that much of the asymmetry in past work may be due to task demands. We discuss the implications of these results for children’s syntactic and pragmatic development.