In this study I investigated whether children, as language learners, show non-adult competence of scope readings of the Swedish focus operator bara ‘only’ in ambiguous and unambiguous sentences. A discrepancy is dictated in ambiguous sentences by the Semantic Subset Principle, and the Principle of Parsimony, the former guiding children, and the latter guiding adults. Two Truth Value Judgement Tasks were conducted among 38 Swedish children (3;6–6;10), and 22 Swedish adults. Furthermore, two Swedish children (1;3.19–2;9.29 and 1;11.8–2;10.4 respectively) and their caretakers found at CHILDES were analyzed with reference to their use of bara. The main conclusion was that children have adult competence of the scope of bara, supporting recent findings that any observed differences between 5 year olds and adults are due to performance factors. The study supports performance accounts to scope investigations. A further conclusion was that children lack adult competence of contrastive stress, i.e. they don’t use it to resolve the ambiguity in sentences with bara.