# The role of revision in children's comprehension of 'but' and 'so'

Elizabeth Swanson, Ana Antonio, Alex de Carvalho

► To cite this version:

Elizabeth Swanson, Ana Antonio, Alex de Carvalho. The role of revision in children's comprehension of 'but' and 'so'. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2026, 265, pp.106460. 10.1016/j.jecp.2026.106460. hal-05466337

HAL Id: hal-05466337

https://hal.science/hal-05466337v1

Submitted on 19 Jan 2026

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - Attribution - International License
# The role of revision in children's comprehension of 'but' and 'so'

Elizabeth M. Swanson<sup>a,b,*</sup> <sup>1</sup>, Ana Antonio<sup>a</sup>, Alex de Carvalho<sup>a</sup>

## ARTICLE INFO

### Keywords:

Connectives

Language processing

Revision

Kindergarten-path effect

Language acquisition

Negation

## ABSTRACT

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.

## Introduction

Connectives such as *so*, *and*, and *but* are used to link clauses together and organize the flow of discourse. Different connectives typically indicate different discourse relations; for instance, *so* usually marks a causal relation between the first clause and the second clause (e.g., *The day was cold, so Mary wore a coat*), while *but* usually marks a contrastive relation between the two clauses (*Asher & Lascarides, 2005; Halliday & Hasan, 1976*). Children acquiring their first language(s) must figure out which connectives map to which kinds of discourse relations. Mastering the subtle meanings of connectives, however, is not straightforward. While children naturally produce connectives such as *so* and *but* by age 3 (*Bloom et al., 1980; Braunwald, 1985; Skarabela, Rabagliati, et al., 2023*), previous work has suggested that they have non-adult-like comprehension of connectives, particularly *but*, until well into the school years, around age 8 to 9 (e.g., *Kail & Weissenborn, 1984; Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al., 2023; Spenader, 2018*). Despite this mounting evidence, it has remained unclear what the source of children's difficulties with *but* may be, and indeed whether they are due to the connective itself at all.

<footnote><sup>a</sup> Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l'Éducation de l'Enfant - LaPsyDE, La Sorbonne, Université Paris Citè, CNRS. Laboratoire A. Binet-Sorbonne, 46 rue Saint Jacques, 75005 Paris, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>b</sup> Department of Linguistics, University of MD—College Park, Marie Mount Hall, 7814 Regents Dr, College Park, MD 20742, USA</footnote>

<footnote>* Corresponding author at: Marie Mount Hall, 7814 Regents Dr, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.</footnote>

<footnote>E-mail addresses: eswan@umd.edu (E.M. Swanson), alex.de-carvalho@u-paris.fr (A. de Carvalho).</footnote>
To illustrate, we can take a naturally-occurring example of *but* from the Gleason corpus, uttered by the mother of a 2.5-year-old child (Masur & Gleason, 1980):

(1) These are for you and Usher **but** they're too hot to touch yet, okay?
(Patricia, Dinner 111)

Comprehending the role of *but* in the sentence would require a child to not only understand each clause, but also realize the intended contrast: The speaker is contrasting their intention for the child and Usher to eat the food with the necessity of not eating it yet, since it is so hot. Arriving at this contrast involves revising some of the expectations created by the first clause, which implies that the child will be able to eat the food imminently.

In this paper, we ask whether children's struggles with *but* are due to a lack of realization that it marks contrastive discourse relations, or whether they may be due to difficulty revising expectations formed based on the initial clause. We carried out two studies with 6- to 9-year-old children learning French. Children participated in a word-learning task involving sentences containing a connective (*alors* 'so' or *mais* 'but') that were either affirmative or contained negation. This allowed us to disentangle the specific connective used from the need to revise initial expectations. For instance, the sentence "The day was cold, *so* Mary *didn't* wear a *dax*" contains the connective *so* but still requires revision of the expectations set up by the first clause. If children hear this sentence and still interpret *dax* as referring to something associated with cold weather, such as a coat, it constitutes evidence that their difficulties are not solely with the contrastive meaning of *but*, but tie into a more general issue with revising initial expectations (e.g., Huang & Hollister, 2019; Omaki et al., 2014; Trueswell et al., 1999; Woodard et al., 2016).

## Background

### Acquisition of connectives

Previous work on the acquisition of connectives has found a sharp divide between children's production and comprehension abilities. Children learning English and Dutch begin producing simple connectives naturalistically between the ages of 2 and 3 (Bloom et al., 1980; Braunwald, 1985; Evers-Vermeul & Sanders, 2009), as illustrated by the following examples:

(2) Maybe you can bend him so he can sit. (Bloom et al., 1980: Kathryn, 2;5).

(3) That looks like a monkey but it's not. (Braunwald, 1985: Laura, 2;6).

Early studies disagreed on whether children's productions—particularly of *but*—are adult-like, using *but* to express various types of contrast (French, 1981; Gallivan, 1986), or whether preschoolers sometimes use *but* where *and* would be more appropriate (Peterson, 1986). Recently, Skarabela, Rabagliati, et al. (2023) presented adult participants with examples of children's naturalistic productions containing *but* or *and* and asked them to guess which connective the child had used. Participants were less accurate on their guesses for 1.5- to 4-year-old children than for 5- to 6-year-old children and for adults. This suggests that children's early productions of connectives are not completely adult-like, although participants were still above chance accuracy even for younger children, indicating that children do still use *but* and *and* in distinguishable contexts. However, production studies are limited in their ability to assess children's understanding of *but* in a range of contexts; children's productions are of limited syntactic complexity, and they may be restricted to a subset of the range of senses *but* can have (Seligman, 1985).

Experimental comprehension studies have found further evidence that children are not adult-like in their interpretation of sentences containing *but* up to at least age 7 (Skarabela et al., 2023; Spenader, 2018). Some studies have asked children to make metalinguistic judgments about which connective is appropriate in a given context, or which sentence could best follow a given connective, and found that children are non-adult-like on such tasks until around age 8 to 10 (Cain & Nash, 2011; Champaud & Bassano, 1994; Florit et al., 2017; Janssens et al., 2015; Kail & Weissenborn, 1984; McClure & Geva, 1983; Spenader, 2018). However, these tasks may place additional cognitive demands on children that could mask an underlying competence.

Studies that use more implicit measures have found earlier success with understanding the contrastive meaning of *but*. Cain & Nash (2011; Study 3) reported that by age 8, children read sentences faster when they contained an appropriate connective than an inappropriate or neutral connective, as in (4):

(4) Amy wanted a dog **but**/*and*/*#after* she was not allowed one.
(appropriate/neutral/inappropriate)

Similarly, Spenader (2018) found that by age 8, children's interpretations of an ambiguous pronoun, such as the one in (5), were influenced by the choice of connective:

Diego asked Sponge Bob to tidy up, **but**/*because* he didn't feel like doing it.
(target interpretation: *he* = Sponge Bob/Diego)

Children, like adults, were more likely to say *he* referred to Sponge Bob when the connective was *but* (marking a contrastive relation) than when it was *because* (marking a causal relation).

A task that has been recently used to study the developmental trajectory of children's understanding of connectives is novel word learning. Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al. (2023) showed English-speaking 2- to 7-year-olds sentences containing *so*, *but*, or no connective, as in (6):
(6) a. Katy was cold, **so/but** she put on a *pagle*.

b. Katy wore a *pagle* on a cold day.

At the same time, children saw pairs of images: one that was semantically associated with the context of the initial clause (for (6), a winter coat) and one that contrasted with that context (a swimsuit). Children were asked to choose the image referred to by the novel word (e.g., “Show me the *pagle*!”). Adults almost always chose the associated image for *so* sentences and generally (around 75%) chose the contrasting image for *but* sentences,<fnref n="1" /> but children showed a different pattern: 2-year-olds were already above chance in choosing the associated image in the *so* and no-connective conditions, and children’s performance increased steadily up to age 7. However, in the *but* condition, from age 2 to 6, children became increasingly likely to select the *associated* image, with 7-year-olds dropping to chance behavior, suggesting they did not robustly infer a contrastive relation for *but* sentences. The authors found similar results with 5-year-olds even when they manipulated various aspects of the task design, when they used sentence completion instead of word learning, and when they made the contrastive inference explicit (e.g., “The day was cold. When the day is cold, you should put your winter clothes on, [**so/but**] Katy put on a…”). They also show that children’s behavior in these tasks does not seem to depend on seeing pictures simultaneously as the sentence unfolds, because they found the same pattern of results when they hid the pictures until it was time for children to respond. The authors conclude that children’s relatively mature productions of *but* and *so* actually mask a major difficulty learning their meanings.

In a similar task with French-speaking 4- to 6-year-olds, Swanson et al. (2024) replicated these results for explicit pointing responses. Strikingly, though, they found that by age 4 children differentiated between *so* and *but* sentences in their real-time eye movements—looking more at the associated image for *so* than *but* sentences. This suggests that preschool-aged children are able to take the connectives into account during online sentence processing, and so have some understanding of their meanings. Nevertheless, children do not make the robust contrastive inferences that adults do (which are detectable in their online processing: Koornneef & Sanders, 2013; Larralde et al., 2025; Larralde & Noveck, 2025). Thus, while prior work has repeatedly found that children are non-adult-like in their understanding of *but* through at least age 7, some evidence of earlier sensitivity to connective choice prompts us to ask whether their difficulty may be due at least in part to other cognitive factors (such as domain-general cognitive control, or the ability to rely on the appropriate linguistic cues when they conflict with each other; reviewed in the following section). That is, children may have some knowledge that the meaning of *but* involves a contrast—and therefore revision of some of their initial expectations—but they may often fail to use *but* as a strong enough cue to revise during online processing.

Revision and children's language processing

Previous studies provide good reasons to think that some of children’s struggles with interpreting *but* in real time might be due to the fact that it requires a revision of initial expectations. Preschool children have been found to exhibit a ‘kindergarten-path effect,’ in which they fail to revise an initial syntactic analysis and interpretation of a sentence (Anderson et al., 2011; Choi & Trueswell, 2010; Huang et al., 2013; Huang & Arnold, 2016; Huang & Hollister, 2019; Hurewitz et al., 2000; Kidd et al., 2011; Omaki et al., 2014; Trueswell et al., 1999; Weighall, 2008). For instance, in Trueswell et al. (1999), participants heard sentences such as “*Put the frog on the napkin onto the book.*” Upon hearing *put the frog on the napkin*, both adults and children looked toward an empty napkin as the destination for the frog. But upon hearing *onto the book*, while adults shifted their gaze toward a book (and placed a frog that was already on a napkin there), children often kept looking at the original destination (the empty napkin) and erroneously placed a frog there. This behavior has been linked to limitations in children’s more general cognitive ability to revise sentence parses or to maintain two different interpretations of the same sentence. One proposal is that young children struggle to inhibit an initial parse once it has been committed, and to flexibly move from one interpretation to the other, reflecting immaturities in executive function skills (such as inhibition and cognitive flexibility; e.g., Bigot et al., 2025; Hsu & Novick, 2016; Qi et al., 2020; Thothathiri et al., 2025; Woodard et al., 2016). Another proposal emphasizes linguistic processing demands: Successful revision requires rapid integration of syntactic, lexical/semantic, and prosodic cues, and children may not yet have the efficiency or experience to balance these various cues in real time when they provide conflicting interpretations (Huang & Hollister, 2019). Under either of these proposals, children’s failures with revision do not reflect a lack of grammatical knowledge, but rather processing bottlenecks that arise from immature or limited cognitive resources as well as, potentially, interactions with the complexity of the linguistic input (Huang et al., 2023).

It is plausible, then, that when children hear sentences containing *but*, they form strong enough expectations from the first clause that they have difficulty fully inhibiting those expectations to arrive at the intended contrast marked by *but*. Upon hearing a sentence like *Katy was cold...* and seeing a winter coat and a swimsuit, they may strongly predict that Katy would be wearing the winter coat, and fail to fully override those expectations even if they have some understanding that *but* is contrastive (and therefore are able to show some looks toward the contrasting image during online processing).

In line with this hypothesis, Swanson et al. (2024) found preliminary evidence suggesting that when children pointed to the (non-adult-like) associated image on *but* trials, they also tended to look toward the associated image while hearing the first clause unfold. This would be consistent with children forming early expectations that the speaker is going to talk about the associated image, and failing to fully override those expectations upon hearing *but*. In the rare cases when children pointed to the (adult-like) contrasting image on *but* trials, they showed less of a preference for the associated image during the first clause. These results could indicate that

<footnote n="1">¹ The fact that adults were not at ceiling with choices of the contrasting image for *but* sentences suggests that even for adults, *but* may sometimes be a relatively weak cue to trigger revision.</footnote>
when children form weaker expectations early in the sentence, they are more able to draw a contrastive inference from *but*, displaying their knowledge of its meaning. In addition, Swanson et al. did not find a relation between adult-like interpretations of *but* (which require revision) and cognitive control skills (using a measure of inhibition and cognitive flexibility in a flanker task), but did find a relation to socioeconomic status—similar to Huang & Hollister (2019)'s finding that higher-SES children demonstrated a stronger ability to revise initial sentence interpretations. Huang & Hollister's proposal is that higher-SES children have more robust language knowledge and, in particular, greater skill with relying on the appropriate cues to sentence interpretation when faced with multiple, conflicting cues. This could explain why higher-SES children were more able to make use of *but* as a cue to revision in Swanson et al. (2024), while lower-SES children may have relied more on initial lexical cues and were less able to revise.

Furthermore, the revision hypothesis has the potential to account for similar behavior exhibited by children in their non-adult-like understanding of temporal connectives: When hearing a sentence like “*She closed the window before/after she put the plate on the table,*” children tend to think that events unfolded in the linear order they are described in the sentence, regardless of whether the connective is *before* or *after* (e.g., Clark, 1971; de Ruiter et al., 2018; Makrodimitris & Schulz, 2024). Once children have formed an expectation about which event will occur first, they have difficulty revising it on the basis of the connective alone.

One of the experimental conditions in Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al. (2023) aimed to test whether the need to revise might contribute to children's difficulties with connectives, by replacing *but* with sentence-initial *even though* (e.g., “*Even though Katy was cold, she put on a pagle*”). This allowed children to hear the contrastive connective intended to cue revision prior to forming expectations from the initial clause. With *even though*, children chose the contrasting image more frequently than for *so* sentences, but still chose the associated image the majority of the time. This suggests that children may be somewhat more successful at revising when they have an earlier cue, but *even though* is still quite a weak cue (note that it is much lower frequency—particularly in sentence-initial position—compared to *but*). The authors interpret their findings as evidence that children's difficulty is largely not with revision, but we believe it is necessary to test the predictions of a revision account with a construction that is more familiar to children: negation (de Carvalho et al., 2021; de Carvalho & Dautriche, 2025; Szabó & Kovács, 2025).

## Research questions and predictions

We therefore pursue the hypothesis that children have some understanding that the meaning of *but* is contrastive, but during online processing it is often not a strong enough cue for children to successfully revise. To test our hypothesis, across two experiments with 6- to 9-year-old French-speaking children, we manipulated both the connective used in the sentence (*alors ‘so’* vs. *mais ‘but’*)<fnref n="2" /> and whether the sentence required revision of the expectations set up by the first clause (with affirmative sentences vs. sentences containing negation). We used a paradigm similar to Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al. (2023) and Swanson et al. (2024), in which the sentences contained a novel word and children pointed to the image they thought the novel word referred to.<fnref n="3" /> Table 1 summarizes the sentence types used in Experiment 1.

In Experiment 1, we had two conditions: an affirmative condition where, as in previous studies, the expected adult-like response is to select the associated image for *so* sentences and the contrasting image for *but* sentences (e.g., “Lea wanted to heat up her food, [*so/but*] she put it in the *rane*”). The other condition, negation-after, placed negation after the connective (e.g., “Lea wanted to heat up her food, [*so/but*] she didn’t put it in the *rane*”). Negation also cues a revision of which image the novel word refers to, so that the expected response for each connective flipped: It was now in the *so* condition that adults would select the contrasting image for *rane*, and in the *but* condition they would select the associated image. In other words, the adult-like answer for *but* sentences was consistent with the initial context (in this example, heating up food), and it was *so* sentences that required revision.

If children's difficulty were with the contrastive meaning of *but* (treating it similarly to *so*), we would expect them to be adult-like for *so* sentences in both the affirmative and the negation-after conditions, and non-adult-like for *but* in both conditions. That is, they should prefer the associated image for both *so* and *but* sentences in the affirmative condition, and the contrasting image for both connectives in the negation-after condition. On the other hand, if children's difficulty is with revising expectations in real time for any construction requiring revision, we would expect them to always prefer the associated image, regardless of connective choice or the presence of negation. This will lead to their behavior appearing non-adult-like with *but* for affirmative sentences, but also non-adult-like with *so* for negation-after sentences.

An additional, exploratory research question was whether we would find age differences or SES differences in children's responses. Our age range was 6 to 9 years and in previous studies children were found to improve with *but* from around age 7–8 (Cain & Nash, 2011; Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al., 2023; Spenader, 2018). We were particularly interested in whether children would also show age differences in their responses for negation-after *so* sentences, not just with *but*. This would suggest that the previously observed developmental pattern is not solely about comprehension of *but*, but rather the ability to revise initial expectations in these types of complex sentences. In our study, SES was estimated based on the years of maternal education after high school, a common proxy in developmental studies (Fernald et al., 2013; Levine et al., 2020; Rowe, 2008; Scaff et al., 2023). We aimed to see whether we would

<footnote n="2">² The meanings of *alors ‘so’* and *mais ‘but’* are reported to be identical to their English translations, in prior work (Champaud & Bassano, 1994) and in our own judgments.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ The French materials we used were closely matched to those used in the English studies by Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al. (2023), using the same images and types of novel referents wherever possible. Minor adaptations were required in a small number of items due to grammatical gender in French (e.g., replacing one food item with another of the same gender), but these changes did not affect the relevant semantic or pragmatic contrasts, as the French affirmative results with adults closely mirrored the English adult results.</footnote>
<caption>**Table 1**</caption>

Sentence types and adult-like image selections for Experiment 1 (affirmative and negation-after conditions). In the example illustrated in the table, participants saw a picture of a fridge on one side of the screen and a picture of a stove on the other side. They heard one of the types of sentences presented and had to choose which of the pictures best illustrated the meaning of the novel word (e.g., *rane*).

<table><thead><tr><th>Sentence type</th><th>Sentence</th><th>Adult-like image choice</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="2">Affirmative</td><td>Lea wanted to heat up her food, <strong>so</strong> she put it in the <strong>rane</strong>.</td><td rowspan="2">Associated</td></tr><tr><td>Lea wanted to heat up her food, <strong>but</strong> she put it in the <strong>rane</strong>.</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Negation after the connective</td><td>Lea wanted to heat up her food, <strong>so</strong> she <u>didn't</u> put it in the <strong>rane</strong>.</td><td rowspan="2">Contrasting</td></tr><tr><td>Lea wanted to heat up her food, <strong>but</strong> she <u>didn't</u> put it in the <strong>rane</strong>.</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Associated

replicate the previously observed effect in Swanson et al. (2024) that higher-SES children had more adult-like performance with *but*.

# Experiment 1

## Method

### Participants

For Experiment 1, we recruited a total of 96 6- to 9-year-old children learning French: 48 6- to 7-year-olds (M = 7.08, SD = 0.46, range: [6.0, 7.92]) and 48 8- to 9-year-olds (M = 8.88, SD = 0.59, range: [8.0, 9.92]). Within each age group, 24 children were in the affirmative condition and 24 in the negation-after condition. We also recruited 48 adult native speakers (M = 25.08, SD = 10.1) to serve as a baseline group (24 affirmative; 24 negation-after). This sample size was chosen because a power analysis based on Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al. (2023; *d* = 0.67 for 5-year-olds) indicated that we needed at least 20 children in each age group to have 80 % power and reach a significance level < 0.05. SES data (indexed by years of maternal education after high school) was available for 77 children (M = 4.34, SD = 2.43, range: [-3,10]).

Children were recruited at public elementary schools in the Paris area or through our lab database. Adults were recruited through our university recruitment system or through the RISC database (https://www.risc.cnrs.fr), and were primarily undergraduates in psychology or related fields. All participants heard and spoke French at least 80 % of the time.

### Procedure

Children participated in the experiment in a quiet room at their preschool, and adults did so in a quiet room at the laboratory. Visual stimuli were presented on a 15.6" laptop computer, and participants wore headphones to listen to the audio. The experiment was programmed in PsychoPy Builder (v2021.2.3). The stimuli, data and scripts for analyses can be found in the OSF repository: https://osf.io/xmj2f/?view_only=b691a24f3d3047fca61c0db7820c0bb7.

At the start of the task, participants watched a video in which they were introduced to an alien puppet named Lola, who invited them to learn some words from her alien language. This provided justification for labeling already-familiar objects with novel words. First, participants completed three training trials with familiar French words (e.g., "Ici il y a deux choses différentes. Une de ces choses sert à éclairer quand il fait nuit. Tu peux me montrer la lampe torche?" - "Here are two different things. One of these is used when it's dark outside. Can you show me the flashlight?"). Then, participants completed 20 test trials with novel pseudowords: 10 sentences with *alors* 'so' and 10 with *mais* 'but', presented in a random order.

Fig. 1 illustrates an example test trial. On each trial, participants saw two images—the associated image and the contrasting
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

"Léa voulait chauffer sa nourriture, [alors/mais] elle ne l'a pas mise dans le rane.
Tu peux trouver le rane?"

Translation: "Lea wanted to heat up her food, [so/but] she didn't put it in the rane.
Can you find the rane?"

<caption>**Fig. 1.** Illustration of a test trial from the negation-after condition in Experiment 1.</caption>

image—with one on each side of the screen. At the same time, they heard the test sentence containing the novel word. After the test sentence, they were asked by Lola to point to the image corresponding to the novel word, and the experimenter coded which image they pointed to.<fnref n="4" />

The following factors were counterbalanced across participants: the type of the initial context (e.g., “Lea wanted to [heat up/freeze] her food…”), type of image (associated vs. contrasting) on each screen side, and which sentences contained *so* vs. *but*.

## Results

Fig. 2 plots participants' proportion of selections of the associated image for *so* sentences and for *but* sentences, in the affirmative condition and in the negation-after condition, by age group. We analyzed the responses for each age group (adults, 6- to 7-year-olds, and 8- to 9-year-olds) using separate models; we test directly for effects of age with children later. First, we were interested in whether participants' points to the associated image for *so* vs. *but* sentences differed at all by condition (affirmative vs. negation-after), to see if we should analyze the conditions separately. To test this, we ran a mixed-effects linear regression model using lme4 (Bates et al., 2015), with the average proportion of points to the associated image as the outcome and the fixed predictors connective type (*so* vs. *but*) and condition (affirmative vs. negation-after), an interaction term between connective type and condition, and a random effect for participant. This revealed a significant interaction of connective type and condition for each age group: adults (β = -1.31, SE = 0.08, *p* < 0.01), 6- to 7-year-olds (β = -0.14, SE = 0.06, *p* = 0.02), and 8- to 9-year-olds (β = -0.58, SE = 0.10, *p* < 0.01). That is, the difference between selections of the associated image for *so* and *but* sentences varied depending on the condition, with fewer selections of the associated image for *so* sentences in the negation-after condition.

We then examined each condition separately, by running mixed-effects linear regression models with the outcome being the average proportion of points to the associated image, the fixed predictor connective type (*so* vs. *but*), and a random effect for participant. All reported *p*-values are from these models. For adults, in the affirmative condition, the associated image was chosen significantly more often for *so* sentences (*M* = 0.98, CI: [0.97,1.00]) than for *but* sentences (*M* = 0.23, CI: [0.15,0.33]) (β = 0.75, SE = 0.05, *p* < 0.01). This reflects adults' tendency to choose the contrasting image on *but* trials. In the negation-after condition, this pattern flipped: Adults chose the associated image significantly less often for *so* sentences (*M* = 0.35, CI: [0.23,0.48]) than for *but* sentences (*M* = 0.90, CI: [0.85,0.95]) (β = -0.56, SE = 0.07, *p* < 0.01). These are the predicted results in the affirmative vs. negation-after conditions for adults, though their accuracy is weaker in the negation-after condition than in the affirmative condition. We can now ask whether children show similar behavior.

In the affirmative condition, 6- to 7-year-olds chose the associated image significantly more often for *so* sentences (*M* = 0.88, CI: [0.79,0.93]) than for *but* sentences (*M* = 0.76, CI: [0.65,0.85]) (β = 0.11, SE = 0.04, *p* = 0.02). In the negation-after condition, we did not observe the same flipped pattern that was shown with adults. Children chose the associated image the majority of time for both *so* sentences (*M* = 0.76, CI: [0.64,0.87]) and *but* sentences (*M* = 0.79, CI: [0.69,0.88]), with no significant difference between the two connective types (β = -0.03, SE = 0.04, *p* = 0.43).

For 8- to 9-year-olds, we again observed that in the affirmative condition, children chose the associated image significantly more for *so* sentences (*M* = 0.95, CI: [0.90,0.98]) than for *but* sentences (*M* = 0.59, CI: [0.43,0.74]) (β = 0.35, SE = 0.08, *p* < 0.01). In the negation-after condition, the direction of this effect flipped, such that children chose the associated image significantly less often for *so* sentences (*M* = 0.50, CI: [0.37,0.65]) than for *but* sentences (*M* = 0.73, CI: [0.61,0.84]) (β = -0.23, SE = 0.06, *p* < 0.01). Note, however, that children's responses for *but* sentences were not significantly different from chance in the affirmative condition, and their responses for *so* sentences were not significantly different from chance in the negation-after condition. We thus see more adult-like behavior from 8- to 9-year-olds, but not fully adult-like behavior.

<footnote n="4">⁴ We did not observe behavioral indications of hesitation or uncertainty during children's responses. Children consistently pointed to a single image with confidence and never attempted to revise or switch their choice after the initial point.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2.** Mean proportion of trials on which participants chose the associated image for *but* trials (red) and *so* trials (blue) for each age group in (a) the affirmative condition and (b) the negation-after condition. Error bars show bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Dots represent individual participant means for each connective type.</figcaption></figure>

Next, we tested for the effect of age on children’s ability to revise by running mixed-effects linear regression models with the outcome as children’s proportion of accurate (expected adult-like) responses for sentences that required revision in each condition: *but* sentences for the affirmative condition, and *so* sentences for the negation-after condition. The predictors (converted to z-scores) were children’s age in years, SES estimated by years of maternal education after high school, and the proportion of accurate responses for sentences that did not require revision in that condition (*so* sentences for the affirmative condition, and *but* sentences for the negation-after condition).<fnref n="5" /> Including accuracy on non-revision sentences as a predictor helps to control for more general language processing abilities that would affect children’s performance on both types of sentences. In the affirmative condition, we found an effect of age (β = 0.13, SE = 0.05, *p* < 0.01) such that older children revised their interpretations of *but* sentences more often, and an effect of accuracy on *so* sentences (β = -0.84, SE = 0.34, *p* = 0.02) such that children who were more accurate on *so* sentences revised their interpretations of *but* sentences less often. This effect may reflect perseveration biases across trials. There was no effect of SES (β = 0.00, SE = 0.02, *p* = 0.87). Similarly, in the negation-after condition, there were effects of both age (β = 0.10, SE = 0.04, *p* < 0.01) and accuracy on *but* sentences (β = -0.98, SE = 0.14, *p* < 0.01), in the same direction, and no effect of SES (β = 0.00, SE = 0.02, *p* = 0.88). These results suggest that older children were more accurate at revising, and also that children who were more accurate on sentences that did not require revision tended to revise less often.

## Discussion

Experiment 1 was designed to disentangle the effect of the specific connective (*alors* ‘so’ vs. *mais* ‘but’) on children’s sentence interpretations from the effect of needing to revise their initial expectations built up during the first clause. This was done by having two experimental conditions: In the affirmative condition (e.g., “Lea wanted to heat up her food, [*so/but*] she put it in the *rane*”) the expected adult-like choice for *so* sentences is the associated image and for *but* sentences it is the contrasting image. In the negation-after condition, negation is present in the second clause (e.g., “Lea wanted to heat up her food, [*so/but*] she didn’t put it in the *rane*”), and the adult-like choice flips so that for *so* sentences it is the contrasting image and for *but* sentences it is the associated image.

For adults, we observed this pattern of results. Their somewhat weaker preference for the expected image choice in the negation-after condition is consistent with previous results suggesting that sentences containing negation are sometimes processed more slowly than affirmative sentences (Kaup et al., 2006, 2007; Tian et al., 2010) and observations that even adults can experience difficulty revising their expectations in certain contexts (Christianson et al., 2001; Lassotta et al., 2016; Slattery et al., 2013). The proposal that adults also sometimes struggle with revision can further account for the finding that adults were already below ceiling (around 75 %) with *but* in the affirmative condition in this study as well as in Swanson et al. (2024) and Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al. (2023).

For children, there was a difference between the two age groups. Six- to 7-year-olds chose the associated image the majority of the time in both conditions, showing a stronger preference for the associated image for *so* sentences than *but* sentences in the affirmative condition but not distinguishing between the two connectives in the negation-after condition. This consistent tendency to pick the

<footnote n="5">⁵ We found no interaction effects between SES and the other predictors and therefore do not include them in the model.</footnote>
associated image is expected if 6- to 7-year-olds are having difficulty revising the expectations formed during the first clause. For 8- to 9-year-olds, we found a flip such that they preferred the associated image more for *so* than *but* sentences in the affirmative condition, and more for *but* than *so* sentences in the negation-after condition. However, they still did not display fully adult-like behavior, as their responses for sentences that required revision (*but* sentences in the affirmative condition and *so* sentences in the negation-after condition) did not differ from chance. The results for the affirmative condition replicate the effects found in previous studies (Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al., 2023; Swanson et al., 2024), but the results for the negation-after condition are novel and at first glance appear to show adult-like behavior for *but* sentences and non-adult-like behavior for *so* sentences.

Taking these findings together, they support the hypothesis that children's difficulty with *but* lies at least in part with more general issues revising initial expectations, for any construction that cues revision, rather than with only the contrastive meaning of *but*. If children simply did not understand what *but* meant, but they could engage in revision, we would not expect that 6- to 7-year-olds would prefer the associated image (rather than the contrasting image) for *so* sentences in the negation-after condition, and that 8- to 9-year-olds would still fail to choose the contrasting image the majority of the time. Children seem to be struggling with *so* and *but* in similar ways, as long as the adult-like interpretation requires revision. This dovetails nicely with recent findings that children as young as 4 do distinguish *so* and *but* during real-time processing, as seen in their eye movements (Swanson et al., 2024). It suggests that other factors—including the need to revise—contribute to children’s prolonged difficulties with understanding sentences containing con- nectives, even at later stages of development (here, between ages 6 and 9).

Turning to individual differences, we found that older children were more likely to revise their interpretations than younger children, indicating that this ability develops with age between 6 and 9 years old. This supports the developmental trajectory sketched in Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al. (2023), in which children gain greater facility with *but* from around 7 years, even as they are not yet adult- like. In addition, children who were more accurate on non-revision sentences tended to be less accurate on revision sentences, sug- gesting that some children had a greater overall propensity to choose the associated image and to persevere in this behavior across trials regardless of sentence type (as also observed in the kindergarten-path context in Snedeker & Yuan, 2008). These results provide further reason to consider revision as a key contributing factor to children’s previously observed struggles with *but*. While we did not observe an effect of SES, it may be because there was not a wide enough SES range in our sample; 80% of child participants had a mother with at least 3 years of post-high-school education.

However, one worry that could arise with the results of Experiment 1 is that in the negation-after condition, children may not understand the negation in the second clause in the intended way. We are suggesting that children apparently fail to take the negation into account because it cues a revision of expectations from the first clause—but this experiment alone does not rule out the possibility that they struggle with negation for some other reason. To directly test this, we conducted a second experiment in which negation was placed in the first clause, so that children would be processing the negation as they were building up their initial expectations. If children could now comprehend the negation, but still showed an overall preference for the associated image, it would provide ev- idence that they only struggle with this type of negation when it cues revision.

## Experiment 2

### Research questions and predictions

For Experiment 2, we wished to verify that children did not have difficulty with negation per se, so that we could be certain their difficulty with negation-after *so* sentences in Experiment 1 was because of the need to revise expectations. Although there is evidence that children understand negation from as young as 18 months (de Carvalho et al., 2021; de Carvalho & Dautriche, 2025; Szabó & Kovács, 2025), we were able to test this directly by placing negation in the first clause rather than the second clause (negation-before condition, e.g., “Lea *didn't* want to heat up her food, [*so/but*] she put it in the *rane*”). This flips which image is associated with the first clause. For instance, for the former example, it is now the refrigerator that is the associated image (since Lea did not want to heat up her food), and the oven is the contrasting image.

If revision is responsible for children’s difficulties, we predict that with negation in the first clause, children should be able to take it into account when forming their early expectations. Therefore, we would expect children’s behavior in the negation-before condition to parallel their behavior in the affirmative condition from Experiment 1: preferring the associated image for both *so* and *but* (despite the fact the identity of the associated image is now flipped). If children have a general difficulty with this type of negation, on the other hand, we would expect that they would choose the contrasting image for both *so* and *but* sentences (e.g., they would think that Lea *did* want to heat up her food and would choose the oven).

## Method

### Participants

For Experiment 2, we recruited an additional 48 6- to 9-year-old children learning French: 24 6- to 7-year-olds (M = 6.92, SD = 0.58, range: [6.0, 7.92]) and 24 8- to 9-year-olds (M = 8.75, SD = 0.64, range: [8.0, 9.92]), as well as 24 adult native speakers (M = 21.25, SD = 4.0) to act as the baseline group. All participants were in the negation-before condition. Again, children were recruited at public Paris elementary schools and adults through our university recruitment system or the RISC database. All participants heard and spoke French at least 80% of the time. SES data (indexed by years of maternal education after high school) was available for 42 children (M = 4.76, SD = 2.62, range: [-3,10]).
<table><caption>**Table 2**
Sentence types and adult-like image selections for Experiment 2 (negation-before condition).</caption><thead><tr><th>Sentence type</th><th>Sentence</th><th>Adult-like image choice</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="2">Negation before the connective (Exp. 2)</td><td>Lea <u>didn't</u> want to heat up her food, <b>so</b> she put it in the <i>rane</i>.</td><td rowspan="2">Associated</td></tr><tr><td>Lea <u>didn't</u> want to heat up her food, <b>but</b> she put it in the <i>rane</i>.</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

### Procedure

The procedure was identical to Experiment 1, except that participants heard sentences with negation in the first clause, such as “Lea <u>didn't</u> want to heat up her food, [<b>so/but</b>] she put it in the <i>rane</i>.” The sentence types used in Experiment 2 are illustrated in Table 2.

### Results

Fig. 3 plots participants' proportion of selections of the associated image for *so* sentences and *but* sentences, by age group, in the affirmative condition from Experiment 1 (for ease of comparison) and in the negation-after condition from Experiment 2. Recall that if children are able to take the negation in the first clause into account, their responses should parallel the affirmative condition from Experiment 1.

As before, we first tested whether participants' points to the associated image for *so* vs. *but* sentences differed in Experiment 1's affirmative condition and Experiment 2's negation-before condition. For each age group, we ran a mixed-effects regression model with the proportion of points to the associated image as the outcome and the fixed predictors connective type (*so* vs. *but*) and condition (affirmative vs. negation-before), an interaction term between connective type and condition, and a random effect for participant. These models did not find a significant interaction of connective type and condition for any age group: adults ($\beta$ = -0.10, SE = 0.07, *p* = 0.17), 6- to 7-year-olds ($\beta$ < 0.01, SE < 0.01, *p* = 1.00), and 8- to 9-year-olds ($\beta$ = -0.16, SE = 0.09, *p* = 0.10). This suggests that there was not a difference in selections of the associated image for *so* and *but* sentences between Experiment 1's affirmative condition and Experiment 2's negation-before condition, which is expected if participants were able to process and understand the negation that appeared in the first clause.

To look more closely at the difference between *so* and *but* sentences in the negation-before condition, we ran a mixed-effects linear regression model for each age group, with the outcome being the average proportion of points to the associated image, the fixed predictor connective type (*so* vs. *but*), and a random effect for participant. All p-values are from these models. Adults chose the associated image significantly more often for *so* sentences (*M* = 0.85, CI: [0.79,0.91]) than *but* sentences (*M* = 0.20, CI: [0.13,0.31]) ($\beta$ = 0.65, SE = 0.05, *p* < 0.01), mirroring the pattern of results observed in Experiment 1's affirmative condition.

Turning to children's responses, 6- to 7-year-olds selected the associated image significantly more often for *so* sentences (*M* = 0.72, CI: [0.61,0.82]) than for *but* sentences (*M* = 0.60, CI: [0.50,0.71]) ($\beta$ = 0.11, SE = 0.04, *p* < 0.01). Eight- to 9-year-olds showed the same pattern, choosing the associated image more for *so* sentences (*M* = 0.88, CI: [0.81,0.94]) than for *but* sentences (*M* = 0.68, CI: [0.56,0.80]) ($\beta$ = 0.20, SE = 0.05, *p* < 0.01). Notice that while there was a significant effect of connective type (*so* vs. *but*), children still chose the associated image the majority of the time for both types of sentences, unlike adults. This parallels children's behavior in Experiment 1's affirmative condition.

As in Experiment 1, we also examined which factors were predictive of children's ability to engage in revision of initial expectations. This was done by running a mixed-effect linear regression model with the outcome being children's proportion of accurate (expected adult-like) responses for *but* sentences (which required revision), and the predictors (converted to z-scores) being children's age in years, SES estimated by years of maternal education, and the proportion of accurate responses for *so* sentences (which did not require revision).<fnref n="6" /> As before, accuracy on non-revision trials was included to help control for more general language processing abilities. There was not a significant effect of age ($\beta$ = 0.00, SE = 0.03, *p* = 0.92) or SES ($\beta$ = -0.01, SE = 0.01, *p* = 0.57), but there was a significant effect of accuracy on non-revision *so* sentences ($\beta$ = -0.80, SE = 0.15, *p* < 0.01) such that children who were more accurate on *so* trials were less accurate on *but* trials. This suggests that some children showed a preference for the associated image across both types of sentences, whether the adult-like interpretation required revision or not, consistent with a perseveration effect.

<footnote n="6">⁶ As in Experiment 1, no interaction effects were found between SES and the other predictors, so we did not include interaction terms in the model.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 3.** Mean proportion of trials on which participants chose the associated image for *but* trials (red) and *so* trials (blue) for each age group in (a) the affirmative condition from Experiment 1 and (b) the negation-before condition from Experiment 2. Error bars show bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Dots represent individual participant means for each connective type (*so* vs. *but*). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)</figcaption></figure>

## Discussion

In Experiment 2, we wished to verify that children were not struggling with negation per se in the second clause in Experiment 1's negation-after condition, and that instead it posed difficulty for the same reason that *but* does: It cues revision of initial expectations built up during the first clause. To investigate this, we added a negation-before condition, in which negation appears in the first clause (e.g., "Lea didn't want to heat up her food, [so/but] she put it in the *rane*"). For these types of sentences, we predicted that children should be able to understand the negation in an adult-like manner, since they should take it into account while building up those initial expectations. If this is the case, participants' responses in the negation-before condition should parallel their responses in the affirmative condition of Experiment 1 (e.g., "Lea wanted to heat up her food, [so/but] she put it in the *rane*"); it is just the identity of the associated vs. contrasting image that has switched, in the negation-before condition.

We found that indeed, participants' behavior was similar in the negation-before condition as in Experiment 1's affirmative condition. As expected, adults preferred the associated image for *so* sentences and the contrasting image for *but* sentences. Children in both age groups chose the associated image the majority of the time for both types of sentences, but showed a greater preference for the associated image with *so* sentences. There also was no interaction between connective type (*so* vs. *but*) and condition (affirmative vs. negation-before), suggesting that children's pattern of responses did not differ between the two experiments. In all three age groups, there is a slightly lower preference for the associated image for *so* sentences in the negation-before condition compared to the affirmative condition, but this is not surprising given previous findings that sentences containing negation are more difficult to process than affirmative sentences, even for adults (Kaup et al., 2006, 2007; Tian et al., 2010). In sum, while these results again show children exhibiting non-adult-like behavior with *but* (which requires revision of initial expectations), they indicate that children are robustly able to take negation into account when it appears in the first clause. It is only in the second clause—the negation-after condition from Experiment 1—when negation cues revision of expectations and children are found not to comprehend it in an adult-like way.

This finding is expected given the evidence that children comprehend negation beginning in infancy, around 18 months old (de Carvalho et al., 2021; de Carvalho & Dautriche, 2025; Szabó & Kovács, 2025). Thus, we would expect 6- to 9-year-olds to demonstrate understanding of negation, and when they do not treat it in an adult-like way (as in Experiment 1's negation-after condition) we should look for an alternative explanation for their behavior. The revision hypothesis offers such an explanation, accounting for children's non-adult-like treatment of both negation and the connective *but*.

## General discussion

Through two experiments with 6- to 9-year-old children learning French, we investigated whether children's previously observed difficulties with sentences containing the connective *but* could be tied to more general difficulties with revising initial expectations. Our results suggest that indeed, the need to revise can explain at least in part why children appear to be so delayed in their comprehension of *but*. In Experiment 1, we showed that children's difficulty was not tied just to the connective *but*, and that they exhibited similar behavior in sentences with *so* and negation after the connective, such as "Lea wanted to heat up her food, *so* she
didn't put it in the *rane*." Just as with affirmative *but* sentences, children tended to assume the novel word referred to the image associated with the initial clause (the oven), failing to revise their early expectations upon encountering the negation. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that this was not due to a lack of understanding negation. When children heard sentences with negation in the first clause instead, such as "Lea *didn't* want to heat up her food, [so/but] she put it in the *rane*," they still chose the associated image (now, the refrigerator) most of the time. This demonstrates that they were able to take negation into account while building up their early expectations, and it only posed a difficulty when it cued revision of these expectations. We discuss the implications of these results, both for the developmental trajectory of children's understanding of connectives, and in relation to broader questions about children's online processing of linguistic constructions.

## *Children's developing knowledge of connectives*

Our results shed new light on previous findings that children do not show evidence of adult-like comprehension of *but* until at least 7 to 8 years old (Cain & Nash, 2011; Champaud & Bassano, 1994; Florit et al., 2017; Janssens et al., 2015; Kail & Weissenborn, 1984; McClure & Geva, 1983; Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al., 2023; Spenader, 2018). These studies have generally suggested that children's responses reflect a failure to recognize that *but* indicates a contrastive discourse relation. However, our findings are more compatible with the hypothesis that children have some understanding that *but* has a contrastive meaning prior to age 7–8, yet struggle to robustly demonstrate this understanding because of the fact that *but* requires revising initial expectations.

We found that on average, children did differentiate between sentences containing *so* and those containing *but*, even with negation present in the first or second clause. The only exception to this pattern was that 6- to 7-year-olds did not show a significant difference between the two connectives in Experiment 1's negation-after condition. Children's relatively consistent ability to distinguish between the two connectives replicates the results—with affirmative sentences—of Skarabela et al. (2023a) with 6- and 7-year-olds in English, and of Swanson et al. (2024) with 4- to 6-year-olds in French, and furthermore indicates that this differentiation is fairly robust to the presence of negation. However, we emphasize that in our study, similar to these two previous studies, children still chose the associated image the majority of the time regardless of the connective used, and they varied in their ability to distinguish between the two connectives. Together with the fact that 4- to 6-year-olds were found in Swanson et al. (2024) to treat *so* and *but* differently in real-time processing (as reflected in their eye movements), these results point toward the idea that in at least some circumstances, children can make use of the connective at an earlier age than previously suggested—perhaps as young as age 4. But there is individual variability in this ability, and much of the time, children are unable to overcome their initial expectations in order to make a contrastive inference based on *but* (as well as second-clause negation).

Moreover, even by age 8–9, children are not fully adult-like, indicating that there is a protracted developmental trajectory to reach adult-like real-time comprehension of connectives. Understanding how performance changes between age 9 and adulthood is important for characterizing the development of the ability to revise with contrastive connectives. Since even adults never reach ceiling in obtaining contrastive interpretations of *but* (Skarabela, Cuthbert, et al., 2023; Swanson et al., 2024) and sometimes have difficulty with other constructions requiring revision (Christianson et al., 2001; Lassotta et al., 2016; Slattery et al., 2013), this development may be gradual; adults’ relatively minor difficulties in processing may be similar in kind to children’s major difficulties. One potential future direction is to incorporate reaction time measures or alternative response paradigms that allow for graded or sequential choice behavior (Ateş & Küntay, 2025), which may shed light on subtle processing differences at various points in development.

Our work can be integrated with previous studies examining children's comprehension of the temporal connectives *before* and *after*. Children have been found to often interpret non-iconic sentences containing *before* or *after* in non-adult-like ways (Clark, 1971; de Ruiter et al., 2018, 2020). They struggle in particular—up to as late as 12—with sentence-medial *after*, as in “She closed the window *after* she put the plate on the table,” where the events are mentioned in the opposite order from which they actually happened in time (the plate-putting occurred before the window-closing) (Makrodimitris & Schulz, 2024). This is suggested to be linked to difficulties with revision: Children begin building a temporal representation of the scene as the sentence unfolds, expecting events to be described in the order they happen. Then, they struggle to revise their understanding of event timing upon encountering *after* in the middle of the sentence. The nature of the inferences that must be revised differs for *but* compared to *after*, since *but* encompasses more than temporal information, but some of children's difficulty with both connectives can be traced back to revision.

Our results also offer the potential to better understand the gap between children's early naturalistic productions of connectives and the trajectory of their connective comprehension. Studies of children's early productions have found that they appear to use connectives in relatively adult-like ways (Bloom et al., 1980; Braunwald, 1985; French, 1981; but cf. Peterson, 1986), and at least distinguish *but* from *and* at age 2–4 (Skarabela, Rabagliati, et al., 2023). Under the hypothesis that children do not realize *but* is contrastive until at least 7, it becomes more difficult to explain why they are so capable of using *but* in naturalistic speech. We believe our results can help address this asymmetry, by positing that children's productions may reflect some genuine understanding that *but* is contrastive. The fact that children's naturalistic utterances occur in more familiar contexts, and that children will presumably be aware of the contrast they are pointing out, allows their knowledge of *but's* contrastive nature to be more apparent. However, in experimental comprehension tasks, where children are trying to make sense of an utterance with a much smaller amount of context, they have more difficulty relying on *but* (and *so* and second-clause negation) as a real-time cue to revision. The information conveyed by the connective is easily overridden by other factors, such as the expectations built up from the initial clause.

It is also notable that similar production-comprehension asymmetries have been reported with other linguistic constructions that require revision—including garden-path sentences (Hurewitz et al., 2000) and sentence-medial *after* (de Ruiter et al., 2018; Diessel, 2004). This pattern suggests that the need to revise may contribute to children's difficulties in comprehension, while their naturalistic
productions point toward some real competence with the constructions in question. Future work could take advantage of production as an alternative method for investigating children's knowledge of these constructions. For instance, in an open-ended elicited production paradigm where children complete the sentence after the connective (e.g., "Mary wanted to eat cookies, but..."), perhaps children would be able to pay more attention to the connective as a cue.

*Children's difficulties with revision in online processing*

Our study provides evidence that at least some of children's struggles with *but* can be accounted for by a more general difficulty with revising expectations formed during the first clause of the sentence. This is because children chose the associated image the majority of the time, regardless of whether the cue which should have prompted them to revise was *but* or negation in the second clause. Importantly, it was only when negation was in the second clause (Experiment 1) that children did not attend to it; when negation was in the first clause (Experiment 2), they were able to take it into account. This finding indicates that the crucial factor creating difficulty for children is the need to revise, rather than independent struggles with *but* or with negation. The results provide further support for the eye-tracking evidence reported in Swanson et al. (2024) with French preschoolers; they are consistent with children forming an early expectation that the speaker is talking about the associated image and having difficulty overriding that expectation.

Our findings align with many previous studies that have suggested preschool-aged children form predictions about a sentence's structure and interpretation as it unfolds, and struggle to revise these predictions upon encountering conflicting information (Anderson et al., 2011; Choi & Trueswell, 2010; Huang et al., 2013; Huang & Arnold, 2016; Huang & Hollister, 2019; Hurewitz et al., 2000; Kidd et al., 2011; Omaki et al., 2014; Trueswell et al., 1999; Weighall, 2008). Various constructions have been found to produce these effects. In Trueswell et al. (1999), for garden-path sentences like "Put the frog on the napkin... onto the book," children struggled to recognize that the prepositional phrase should be attached to the verb phrase (describing the frog's destination) rather than the noun phrase (describing the frog's current location). In Huang & Arnold (2016) and Huang et al. (2013), the focus was on children's incremental assignment of grammatical roles: In sentences like "The seal is quickly eaten by it," children often did not interpret it as the agent, appearing to assign *the seal* as the likely agent and to have difficulty overriding this. In our study, children anticipated the likely referent of a novel word using the context of the entire initial clause, and failed to take into account the connective or second-clause negation. The diversity of constructions that have elicited these effects indicates that this early formation of difficult-to-revise expectations is a general property of children's language processing.

It remains unclear the extent to which the mechanisms involved in this type of revision are linguistic, as opposed to being grounded in domain-general executive function (EF) abilities, particularly cognitive control (Davidson et al., 2006; Diamond, 2013; Thothathiri et al., 2025). The ability to revise an initial interpretation of garden-path sentences such as "Put the frog on the napkin onto the book" has been found to correlate with EF skills in preschool children (Qi et al., 2020; Woodard et al., 2016) and with engagement of cognitive control in adults (Hsu & Novick, 2016). Furthermore, cognitive control skills such as inhibition and cognitive flexibility show prolonged development throughout childhood and begin to plateau only around age 11–12 (Lagattuta et al., 2011; Prencipe et al., 2011; Wright et al., 2003); this is consistent with our findings that children are not adult-like with second-clause revision even at age 8–9. However, it has also been suggested that in children, the ability to revise more strongly tracks socioeconomic status (SES), as a proxy for linguistic knowledge and especially the ability to place greater weight on cues that are less frequent in the input (Huang et al., 2023; Huang & Hollister, 2019). Similarly, for sentences containing *but*, Swanson et al. (2024) found a link to SES and not to cognitive control skills. There was no association between accuracy with revising and SES in our study, but our SES range may have been too limited to detect an effect. Also, children do begin to revise certain kinds of garden-path sentences by around age 8 (Trueswell et al., 1999; Weighall, 2008), which is earlier than with *but* or second-clause negation. Thus, it is possible that different cognitive factors, or different characteristics of the language input, are more relevant for different constructions involving revision. For instance, sentences with *but* and second-clause negation require listeners to down-weight the highly predictive lexical-semantic cues from the first clause on the basis of a short, late-appearing function word, which may place particularly high demands on children.

Adding to the complex picture, *Ovans et al.* (2018) argued that engaging cognitive control in children does not always lead to an increased ability to revise initial interpretations, but rather leads them to rely more strongly on reliable cues. This would suggest that both cognitive control and language knowledge could play a role in children's revision abilities. If children with less robust language knowledge do not understand connectives (and second-clause negation) as reliable cues to linguistic meaning, then stronger cognitive control skills might not help them rely on these cues. Indeed, supporting the hypothesis that connectives may not be reliable cues, adult corpus work has found a surprisingly high degree of substitutability between different connectives (Rohde et al., 2017, 2018). Thus, children might require more language knowledge (likely dependent on their language input) before they can take the connective into account and revise in an adult-like manner.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the continued non-adult-like performance we observe at ages 8–9 may reflect not only ongoing maturation of executive functions, but also the interaction of these developing cognitive resources with properties of specific linguistic constructions, such as the timing and informational weight of contrastive connectives, and characteristics of the language input which can vary with socioeconomic status (SES). For instance, there are SES differences in the amount of complex sentences children hear (Huang et al., 2023; Huttenlocher et al., 2010), which creates variability in their exposure to multiclause sentences and connectives. We view disentangling the complex factors underlying revision in child language processing as an important direction for future work, particularly in the understudied age range between late childhood and adulthood.

In sum, our results indicate that children's previously observed difficulty with comprehending the connective *but* is likely due primarily to immature skills with revision, rather than a lack of understanding that *but* is contrastive. When the type of connective used
is disentangled from the need to revise expectations, 6- to 9-year-old children still fail to override predictions formed on the basis of the initial clause. This study allows us to locate children’s struggles with connectives within a broader understanding of their developing language processing abilities.

### CRediT authorship contribution statement

**Elizabeth Swanson:** Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. **Ana Antonio:** Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. **Alex de Carvalho:** Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Conceptualization.

### Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

### Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the children, families, and adult participants who participated in our study. We thank John Trueswell, Jeffrey Lidz, and Alexander Williams for helpful discussion. We also acknowledge financial support from the CNRS through the MITI interdisciplinary program, and from Sciences Po – Université Paris Cité (Fonds Investissement d'Avenir), both awarded to Alex de Carvalho.

### Data availability

A link to our data/code is provided in the manuscript.

### References

Anderson, S., Farmer, T., Goldstein, M., Schwade, J., & Spivey, M. (2011). Individual differences in measures of linguistic experience account for variability in the sentence processing skill of five-year-olds. *Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 7*, 203–221. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.7.12and

Asher, N., & Lascarides, A. (2005). *Logics of Conversation*. Studies in natural language processing, Cambridge.

Ates, A. B., & Küntay, A. C. (2025). When words and pointing compete: Young children's referential comprehension under uncertainty. *Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 260*, Article 106323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2025.106323

Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models using lme4. *Journal of Statistical Software, 67*(1). https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.

Bigot, V., Trueswell, J., & de Carvalho, A. (2025). Cognitive control skills are related to ambiguity awareness in French-learning 5-to-6-year-olds: Implications for reading development. *Cognitive Science, 49*(7). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70089

Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K., & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: Acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. *Journal of Child Language, 7*, 235–261. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900002610

Braunwald, S. R. (1985). The development of connectives. *Journal of Pragmatics, 9*(4), 513–525. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(85)90019-0

Cain, K., & Nash, H. M. (2011). The influence of connectives on young readers' processing and comprehension of text. *Journal of Educational Psychology, 103*(2), 429. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022824

Champaud, C., & Bassano, D. (1994). French concessive connectives and argumentation: An experimental study in eight- to ten-year-old children. *Journal of Child Language, 21*(2), 415–438. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900009338

Choi, Y., & Trueswell, J. C. (2010). Children's (in)ability to recover from garden paths in a verb-final language: Evidence for developing control in sentence processing. *Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 106*(1), 41–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.01.003

Christianson, K., Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J. F., & Ferreira, F. (2001). Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. *Cognitive Psychology, 42*(4), 368–407. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.2001.0752

Clark, E. V. (1971). On the acquisition of the meaning of *before* and *after*. *Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 10*(3), 266–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(71)80054-3

Davidson, M. C., Amso, D., Anderson, L. C., & Diamond, A. (2006). Development of cognitive control and executive functions from 4 to 13 years: Evidence from manipulations of memory, inhibition, and task switching. *Neuropsychologia, 44*(11), 2037–2078. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.02.006

de Carvalho, A., Crimon, C., Barrault, A., Trueswell, J., & Christophe, A. (2021). "Look! It is not a bamoule!": 18- and 24-month-olds can use negative sentences to constrain their interpretation of novel word meanings. *Developmental Science, 24*(4), Article e13085. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13085

de Carvalho, A., & Dautriche, I. (2025). 20-month-olds can use negative evidence while learning word meanings. *Cognition, 262*, Article 106171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106171

de Ruiter, L. E., Lieven, E. V. M., Brandt, S., & Theakston, A. L. (2020). Interactions between givenness and clause order in children's processing of complex sentences. *Cognition, 198*, Article 104130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104130

de Ruiter, L. E., Theakston, A. L., Brandt, S., & Lieven, E. V. M. (2018). Iconicity affects children's comprehension of complex sentences: The role of semantics, clause order, input and individual differences. *Cognition, 171*, 202–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.10.015

Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. *Annual Review of Psychology, 64*, 135–168. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750

Diesel, H. (2004). *The Acquisition of Complex Sentences*. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486531.

Evers-Vermeul, J., & Sanders, T. (2009). The emergence of Dutch connectives; how cumulative cognitive complexity explains the order of acquisition. *Journal of Child Language, 36*, 829–854. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000908009227

Fernald, A., Marchman, V. A., & Weisleder, A. (2013). SES differences in language processing skill and vocabulary are evident at 18 months. *Developmental Science, 16*(2), 234–248. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12019

Florit, E., Cain, K., & Levorato, M. C. (2017). Understanding the semantic functions of but in middle childhood: The role of text- and sentence-level comprehension abilities. *First Language, 37*(2), 109–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723716678383

French, L. (1981). *But of Course Preschoolers Understand the Meaning of “But!”* https://eric.gov/?id=ED209921.
Gallivan, J. (1986). Children's Understanding of "But": Evidence from Spontaneous Production. *Psychological Reports*, **58**(2), 425-426. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr01.1986.58.2.425

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). *Cohesion in English* (1st Edition). Routledge.

Hsu, N. S., & Novick, J. M. (2016). Dynamic Engagement of Cognitive Control Modulates Recovery from Misinterpretation during Real-Time Language Processing. *Psychological Science*, **27**(4), 572-582. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615625223

Huang, Y. T., & Arnold, A. R. (2016). Word learning in linguistic context: Processing and memory effects. *Cognition*, **156**, 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.07.012

Huang, Y. T., Byrd, A. S., Asmah, R., & Domanski, S. (2023). Evaluating "meaningful differences" in learning and communication across SES backgrounds. *Annual Review of Linguistics*, **9**(Volume 9, 2023), 589–608. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521-045816.

Huang, Y. T., & Hollister, E. (2019). Developmental parsing and linguistic knowledge: Reexamining the role of cognitive control in the kindergarten path effect. *Journal of Experimental Child Psychology*, **184**, 210–219. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.04.005

Huang, Y. T., Zheng, X., Meng, X., & Snedeker, J. (2013). Children's assignment of grammatical roles in the online processing of Mandarin passive sentences. *Journal of Memory and Language*, **69**(4). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.08.002

Hurewitz, F., Brown-Schmidt, S., Thorpe, M., Gleitman, L. R., & Trueswell, J. C. (2000). One frog, two frog, red frog, blue frog: Factors affecting children's syntactic choices in production and comprehension. *Journal of Psycholinguistic Research*, **29**(6), 597-626. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:10264682099238

Huttenlocher, J., Waterfall, H., Vasilyeva, M., Vevea, J., & Hedges, L. V. (2010). Sources of variability in children's language growth. *Cognitive Psychology*, **61**(4), 343-365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.08.002

Janssens, L., Droogmans, S., & Schaeken, W. (2015). But: Do age and working memory influence conventional implicature processing? *Journal of Child Language*, **42**(3), 695-708. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000914000312

Kail, M., & Weissenborn, J. (1984). A developmental cross-linguistic study of adversative connectives: French 'mais' and German 'aber/sondern. *Journal of Child Language*, **11**(1), 143-158. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900005638

Kaup, B., Lüdtke, J., & Zwaan, R. A. (2006). Processing negated sentences with contradictory predicates: Is a door that is not open mentally closed? *Journal of Pragmatics*, **38**(7), 1033-1050. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2005.09.012

Kaup, B., Yaxley, R. H., Madden, C. J., Zwaan, R. A., & Lüdtke, J. (2007). Experiential simulations of negated text information. *Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology* (2006), 60(7), 976-990. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470210600823512.

Kidd, E., Stewart, A. J., & Serratrice, L. (2011). Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: The role of the referential scene in garden-path recovery. *Journal of Child Language*, **38**(1), 222-234. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000909990316

Koorneef, A. W., & Sanders, T. J. M. (2013). Establishing coherence relations in discourse: The influence of implicit causality and connectives on pronoun resolution. *Language and Cognitive Processes*, **28**, 1169-1206. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2012.699076

Lagattuta, K. H., Sayfan, L., & Monsour, M. (2011). A new measure for assessing executive function across a wide age range: Children and adults find happy-sad more difficult than day-night. *Developmental Science*, **14**(3), 481-489. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00994.x

Larralde, C., Moyer, M., Pouscoulous, N., & Noveck, I. (2025). Isolating the extra-logical features of but and so by comparing their processing to and's: An investigation with thematically neutral content. *Glossa Psycholinguistics*, **4**(1). https://doi.org/10.5070/G6011.1593

Larralde, C., & Noveck, I. (2025). Deciphering the electrophysiological signature of discourse connectives. *Journal of Pragmatics*, **241**, 144–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.009

Lassotta, R., Omaki, A., & Franck, J. (2016). Developmental changes in misinterpretation of garden-path wh-questions in French. *Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology* (2006), 69(5), 829-854. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1054845.

Levine, D., Pace, A., Luo, R., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Michnick Golinkoff, R., De Villiers, J., Iglesias, A., & Sweig Wilson, M. (2020). Evaluating socioeconomic gaps in preschoolers' vocabulary, syntax and language process skills with the Quick Interactive Language Screener (QUILS). *Early Childhood Research Quarterly*, **50**, 114-128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.11.006

Makrodimitris, C., & Schulz, P. (2024). Comprehension of complex sentences containing temporal connectives: How children are led down the event-semantic kindergarten-path. *Journal of Child Language*, **1–33**. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000924000205

Masur, E. F., & Gleason, J. B. (1980). Parent-Child Interaction and the Acquisition of Lexical Information during Play. *Developmental Psychology*, **6**(5), 404-409.

McClure, E., & Geva, E. (1983). The development of the cohesive use of adversative conjunctions in discourse. *Discourse Processes*, **6**(4), 411-432. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638538309544575

Omaki, A., Davidson White, I., Goro, T., Lidz, J., & Phillips, C. (2014). No Fear of Commitment: Children's Incremental Interpretation in English and Japanese Wh-questions. *Language Learning and Development*, **10**(3), 206-233. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2013.844048

Ovans, Z., Novick, J., & Huang, Y. T. (2018). *Better to be reliable than early: Cognitive-control effects on developmental parsing*. 31st Conference on Human Sentence Processing.

Peterson, C. (1986). Semantic and pragmatic uses of "but. *Journal of Child Language*, **13**, 583-590. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900006905

Prencipe, A., Kesek, A., Cohen, J., Lamm, C., Lewis, M. D., & Zelazo, P. D. (2011). Development of hot and cool executive function during the transition to adolescence. *Journal of Experimental Child Psychology*, **108**(3), 621-637. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.09.008

Qi, Z., Love, J., Fisher, C., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2020). Referential context and executive functioning influence children's resolution of syntactic ambiguity. *Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition*, **46**(10), 1922-1947. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000886

Rohde, H., Dickinson, A., Schneider, N., Louis, A., & Webber, B. (2017). Exploring Substitutability through Discourse Adverbials and Multiple Judgments. 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics.

Rohde, H., Johnson, A., Schneider, N., & Webber, B. (2018). Discourse Coherence: Concurrent Explicit and Implicit Relations. In *Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics* (pp. 2257-2267).

Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech: Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child development and child vocabulary skill. *Journal of Child Language*, **35**(1), 185-205. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000907008343

Scaff, C., Fibla, L., & Cristia, A. (2023). Factors structuring lexical development in toddlers: The effects of parental education, language exposure, and age. *Journal of Child Language*, **50**(3), 757-777. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000186

Seligman, M. (1985). *But: What and How It Means* [Technical report]. UC Berkeley.

Skarabela, B., Cuthbert, N., Rees, A., Rohde, H., & Rabagliati, H. (2023). Learning dimensions of meaning: Children's acquisition of but. *Cognitive Psychology*, **147**, Article 101597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2023.101597

Skarabela, B., Rabagliati, H., Wilke, H., & Rohde, H. (2023). *November 4*. sources of evidence for acquiring discourse connectives: Explaining production-comprehension asymmetry in the acquisition of but. Boston University.

Slattery, T. J., Sturt, P., Christianson, K., Yoshida, M., & Ferreira, F. (2013). Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentence sentences arise from competing syntactic representations. *Journal of Memory and Language*, **69**(2), 104–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.04.001

Snedeker, J., & Yuan, S. (2008). Effects of prosodic and lexical constraints on parsing in young children (and adults). *Journal of Memory and Language*, **58**(2), 574-608. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.08.001

Spenader, J. (2018). Children's comprehension of contrastive connectives. *Journal of Child Language*, **45**(3), 610-640. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000917000423

Swanson, E., Rabagliati, H., & de Carvalho, A. (2024). Preschoolers' real-time eye movements reveal sensitivity to connective meanings during word learning. In *Proceedings of the 48th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development* (pp. 572-585).

Szabó, E., & Kovács, Á.-M. (2025). Do early meanings of negation map onto a fully-fledged negation concept in infancy? *Cognition*, **254**, Article 105929. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105929

Thothathiri, M., Kidd, E., & Rowland, C. (2025). The role of executive function in the processing and acquisition of syntax. *Royal Society Open Science*, **12**(3), Article 201497. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201497
Tian, Y., Breheny, R., & Ferguson, H. J. (2010). Why we simulate negated information: A dynamic pragmatic account. *The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63*(12), 2305-2312. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2010.525712

Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M., & Logrip, M. L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. *Cognition, 73*(2), 89-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00032-3

Weighall, A. R. (2008). The kindergarten path effect revisited: Children's use of context in processing structural ambiguities. *Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 99*(2), 75-95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2007.10.004

Woodard, K., Pozzan, L., & Trueswell, J. C. (2016). Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners. *Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 141*, 187-209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2015.08.005

Wright, I., Waterman, M., Prescott, H., & Murdoch-Eaton, D. (2003). A new Stroop-like measure of inhibitory function development: Typical developmental trends. *Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44*(4), 561-575. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.00145