The role of revision in children’s comprehension of ‘but’ and ‘so’

• 6- to 9-year-olds’ use of but and so was tested in a novel word interpretation task. • Children failed only when sentences required revising initial expectations. • With second-clause negation, children succeeded with but and struggled with so. • Findings challenge a simple lack of recognition that but is contrastive. • Revision difficulty persists up to age 9 in multiclausal sentence comprehension. Prior work has found that before age 8, children do not typically draw contrastive inferences from sentences containing the connective but. In this study, we examined whether children’s non-adult-like comprehension of sentences with but is due to a failure to understand the contrastive meaning of the connective, or whether their behavior may stem from a more general difficulty with revising expectations formed early in sentence processing. In Experiment 1, 96 French-learning 6- to 9-year-old children heard sentences containing so or but, and with or without negation in the second clause (e.g., “Lea wanted to heat up her food, [so/but] she (didn’t) put it in the rane ”) and were asked to select the picture matching the novel word rane (oven or refrigerator). Regardless of the connective used or the presence of negation, children always chose the image associated with the context of the initial clause (here, the oven). In Experiment 2 with 48 French-learning 6- to 9-year-olds, we confirmed that children were sensitive to negation when it appeared in the first clause (“Lea didn’t want to heat up her food…”), indicating that their difficulty lay in using cues in the second clause to revise initially built-up expectations. These findings suggest that children’s delays in understanding but are not specific to the connective itself, but reflect a more general challenge with revising linguistic predictions formed during the course of language processing. More broadly, they highlight the crucial role of cognitive flexibility in the development of mature sentence interpretation and language acquisition.