Previous studies on the acquisition of factivity have shown partial understanding of factive complements, as well as problems with their syntactic structure. These studies fail to consider language variation and the possible role of tense and aspect as morphological markers of factivity. An experiment tested comprehension of factive complements in English, German and Spanish (67 children aged 3 to 6 years). A follow-up study (40 English children aged 3 to 6 years) replicated the first study with additional questions to assess story comprehension, and tested the understanding of the presuppositions of factive and non-factive complements in isolation. Our results indicate a general difficulty with understanding factive complements in contexts which contradict the presuppositions, as well as crosslinguistic variation in the understanding of presuppositions in the different syntactic conditions. The identified crosslinguistic differences in acquisition are attributed to language variation with respect to tense and aspect.
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