1T.H.E. Editor(s) (ed.), Book title, 1—7.© yyyy Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

LUISA MERONI, ANDREA GUALMINIAND STEPHEN CRAIN

EVERYBODY KNOWS

Abstract. Much current research is devoted to children’s non-adult responsesto sentences containing the universal quantifier every. In this chapter wereview two alternative views: one that attributes children’s responses to non-adult grammars and one that focuses on extra-linguistic factors to explainchildren’s non-adult responses. We argue that the grammatical view facesseveral theoretical concerns, and, in light of research experimental findings,we demonstrate that it also suffers from limited explanatory power.

1. INTRODUCTION

Children’s interpretation of the universal quantifier every has been the subjectof abundant investigations of child language. These investigations start fromthe observation, due to Inhelder and Piaget (1964), that some children show asystematic non-adult interpretation of sentences containing the universalquantifier every. In particular, Inhelder and Piaget (1964) discovered that pre-school and even school-age children sometimes respond “No” to the questionIs every boy riding an elephant? in a context where three boys are each ridingan elephant and a fourth elephant (referred to as the ‘extra-object’) is notbeing ridden.

This chapter scrutinizes two alternative accounts of thisphenomenon. First, we introduce the original findings and the two alternativeviews that have been proposed to explained the findings. Then we turn to thecurrent debate. In particular, we raise several theoretical concerns about therecent accounts of children’s ‘errors’ that attribute them to non-adultlinguistic principles. Another view, which we endorse, emphasizes non-linguistic factors that have been found to affect children’s performance incertain experimental contexts, but not in others. Finally, we turn to thelaboratory to follow up some predictions of the current linguistic accounts ofchildren’ behavior. The findings of the experiments we present resistexplanation on the linguistic accounts of children’s non-adult responses.Therefore, they add further support for an account that is based on non-linguistic factors.

2 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

2. BACKGROUND

A good deal of work in language acquisition has been devoted to theinvestigation of children’s interpretation of sentences that contain theuniversal quantifier, e.g. every in English. It has been observed in severalexperimental studies and across several languages that some school-agechildren experience difficulty in interpreting such sentences (e.g., Inhelderand Piaget, 1964; Roeper and de Villiers, 1991; Philip, 1995). Non-adultresponses from children have been found in various conditions, including thecircumstance exemplified in the picture in Figure 1, where three boys areeach riding an elephant and a fourth elephant (referred to as the ‘extra-object’) is not being ridden. Children who are shown such a picturesometimes respond “No” to the question Is every boy riding an elephant? inresponse to this picture.

(1) Is every boy riding an elephant?

Figure 1. The Extra-Object Condition

To justify their negative answer to the question in (1), some children point tothe extra object, i.e., the elephant that is not being ridden. This reply has beencalled the symmetrical response or the exhaustive pairing response in theliterature since children who give this kind of response seem to interpret thequestion to be about the symmetry (i.e., one-to-one relation) between the setof entities denoted by the subject noun (the boys) and the set denoted by the

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object noun (the elephants). It should be noted, however, that the childrenwho produce the symmetrical response to questions like (1) often produceadult-like “Yes” responses in the same circumstances. It is also noteworthythat these same children sometimes produce a symmetrical-type responseeven when they are asked a question that mentions just one set of entities, asin Is every boy riding?I

Several accounts of children’s non-adult responses have beenoffered. Broadly speaking, these accounts can be divided into ones thatattribute children’s responses to deviant linguistic analyses of quantifiedexpressions, and ones that attribute them to non-linguistic factors. Anoteworthy example of the non-linguistic kind of account is offered byFreeman, Sinha and Stedmon (1982), who propose that the experiments thatevoke errors violate the conventional rules of discourse analysis. CreditingJohn Locke (1690), and William James (1892) with relevant observationsabout principles of discourse, these authors suggest that children’s non-adultresponses arise because children adhere to discourse principles in a way thatexperimenters sometimes do not; on this view, children’s ‘errors’ reflect theirrational attempt to understand “the speaker’s purpose and intended frame ofreference” in contexts that flout the usual discourse practices of naturallanguage.

On the account advanced by Freeman et al. (1982), children arecredited with adult-like knowledge of linguistic principles of syntax andsemantics, as well as adult-like knowledge of the pragmatic principles thatgovern language use in ordinary conversational contexts. When childrenproduce non-adult responses, on this account, it is because they areconfronted with circumstances in which grammatical principles are at oddswith principles of discourse. In such circumstances, children are left to inferthe discourse topic that the speaker intends, because it is clear from thecontext that the discourse topic that is ordinarily associated with thesentences in question cannot be the one that is actually intended by thespeaker. Children are therefore forced to either violate principles of grammar(i.e., syntax and semantics) or principles of discourse. Freeman et al. arguethat, when confronted with dilemmas of this kind, children frequently chooseto ignore the discourse topic that is usually assigned to such sentences inorder to respond to an inferred discourse topic. In short, based on theirknowledge of “conventional rules of use which encompass the perceivedpurposes and intentions of the speaker … children try to understand whatpeople mean, not only what words mean” (Freeman et al, 1982; p. 69).Children’s non-adult behavior, however, should not be interpreted asevidence that they lack linguistic knowledge, according to Freeman et al.:

“Whenever children give strange answers in such studies, it is up to thepsychologist to prove that he or she has really established joint reference with

4 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

the child in the way that was intended, if faulty semantic/syntacticcomprehension is to be invoked as an explanation. It is essential to worktowards independent evidence of this, and it is not sufficient to say thatchildren must have miscomprehended the semantics solely on the grounds of acontext-free truth-value violation somewhere. … Only if there is independentevidence that the relevant frame of reference has been set up, and the relevantdistinctions have been drawn, and that still the answer is wrong, are we on safegrounds in producing a purely linguistic analysis.” (pp. 70-71)

To adjudicate between linguistic and non-linguistic accounts ofchildren’s non-adult responses to linguistic expressions, Freeman et al. adopta dual-route approach. If a non-linguistic account of children’s non-adultbehavior is correct, then it should be possible “to get adults to give child-likeanswers, and children to reverse their strategies.” (p. 66). We postponediscussion of ways to induce children to reverse their performance strategies.Suffice it to say that most researchers agree that this can indeed beaccomplished, though there is considerable disagreement on the method andon the interpretation of children’s adult-like behavior. As for eliciting child-like behavior from adults, this too has proven to be straightforward. Forexample, Freeman et al. interviewed twenty adults, showing them a picture offour saucers, three with one cup on them. In responding to the question, Areall the cups on the saucers? 17 of the 20 adults replied “No.” That is, adultsare duped into giving a symmetrical response, if real-world knowledge issufficiently biased towards this response. [probably insert fn on plurals issue]In view of the circumstantial evidence favoring a non-linguistic account ofchildren’s ‘errors’ in the previous literature, and in the absence of compellingevidence that children continue to make such ‘errors’ when the rules ofdiscourse are followed properly, Freeman et al. conclude that a linguisticaccount of children’s non-adult behavior cannot be sustained.

Nevertheless, several researchers have proposed linguistic accountsof children’s non-adult responses to sentences with the universal quantifier.One recent proposal is the Event Quantification account advanced by Philip(1995). This account explains symmetrical responses by children to sentenceswith transitive verb phrases, such as the question in (1), as the product of anon-adult linguistic analysis. On the Event Quantification account, sentenceswith the universal quantifier every are ambiguous for children. Oneinterpretation of such sentences is similar to that of adults. However, theEvent Quantification account maintains that children also assign aninterpretation that is exclusive to child grammar, and this accounts for thesymmetrical response. Roughly the proposal is that children can analyze theuniversal quantifier every as an unselective binder, on analogy with temporaladverbs like always and usually in the adult grammar. In extending theanalysis of adverbs to the universal quantifier, Philip (1995) contends that thedeterminer every quantifies over events (as well as individuals) in child

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grammar, whereas it only quantifies over individuals in the adult grammar.On the Event Quantification account, the sentence Every boy is riding anelephant is assigned the truth conditions represented in (2):

(2) For every event e in which either an elephant or a boyparticipates, or which is a possible sub-event of a boy-riding-an-elephant, a boy is riding an elephant in e.

As (2) indicates, Every boy is riding an elephant is true only if, in each eventinvolving an elephant, there is a boy riding the elephant. Since Figure 1contains an elephant that is not being ridden by a boy, children give anegative answer to the question in (1) (see Philip, 1995; 1996 for a morecomplete explanation).

The Event Quantification account is criticized by Crain, Thornton,Boster, Conway, Lillo-Martin and Woodams (1996) on both empirical andtheoretical grounds. They point out that only 87 of the 276 (37%) childsubjects that were tested in the Philip (1995) study were ‘pure’ cases of‘Symmetry Children,’ i.e., children whose predominant type of response wasthe symmetrical response. These Symmetry Children produced suchresponses only 57% of the time, however. These children produced adult-likeresponses on the remaining trials. In addition, roughly half of the SymmetryChildren’s non-adult responses should be chalked up to noise, since thesechildren continued to produce ‘symmetrical’ responses almost half the timewhen they were responding to questions with intransitive verb phrases, like Isevery boy riding?. The Event Quantification account does not extend to suchsentences, so children’s non-adult responses to them are attributed by Philip(1995) to ‘carry over effects’ or ‘response strategies.’ Once we factor outchildren’s adult-like responses and responses due to noise, it turns out thatonly about one-fifth of the responses of the Symmetry Children are governedby the Event Quantification analysis of children’s responses.

Besides the limited number of children’s non-adult responses thatmotivated the Event Quantification account, Crain et al. (1996) raise severaltheoretical shortcomings with the account. First, it is difficult to see how thelinguistic analysis attributed to children could be purged from children’sgrammars. The problem of learnability arises because, as we saw, SymmetryChildren produce adult-like “Yes” answers much of the time. According tothe Event Quantification account, both adult and non-adult analyses areaccessed by these children in response to sentences with the universalquantifier. In other words, such sentences are ambiguous for them, whereasthe same sentences are unambiguous for adults. To converge on the targetgrammar, therefore, children have to ‘unlearn’ the non-adult interpretation.This is problematic, however, since all of the parental input is consistent with

6 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

one of the interpretations generated by the grammars of these children,namely the adult interpretation. To purge their grammars of the non-adultinterpretation, then, children would seem to need some form of negativeevidence, informing them that adults do not accept the non-adultinterpretation under any circumstances. Even if negative evidence proved tobe robustly available to children, however, it would miss the mark, becausethe non-adult interpretation makes sentences true in a subset of thecircumstances that verify these sentences for adults. So, for example, ifchildren produced a sentence with the universal quantifier in a circumstancethat corresponds to the symmetrical interpretation, the sentence would beacceptable for adults. It is difficult to see, therefore, how children couldexpunge the non-adult interpretation proposed by the Event Quantificationaccount from their grammars.

A second problem with the Event Quantification account is that thelinguistic analysis attributed to children violates a principle of UniversalGrammar. Crosslinguistic research on formal semantics has concluded thatthe meanings of all natural language determiners, including the universalquantifier every, bear the property of conservativity (see e.g., Barwise andCooper, 1981). Of all the logically possible relations that could constitutedeterminer meanings, the language faculty has apparently evolved such thatall determiners in natural language are conservative. In particular, theprinciple of conservativity eliminates the meaning equinumerous as apossible meaning of a natural language determiner, but it is precisely thismeaning that is assigned to the universal quantifier, every, on the EventQuantification account. Accounts of differences in the behavior of childrenand adults should not compromise putative linguistic universals, such as theconservativity of determiner meanings, in the absence of compellingempirical evidence to the contrary. Similar remarks pertain to the principle ofcompositionality, which is operative in adult grammars for the sentencesunder consideration, but not in child grammars according to the EventQuantification account.

In view of the empirical limitations and theoretical concerns withlinguistic accounts of children’s non-adult responses to sentences with theuniversal quantifier, such as the Event Quantification account, researchershave conjectured that non-linguistic factors might be the source of children‘ssymmetrical responses, on those occasions when such responses occur. Oneconjecture, by Freeman et al. (1982), focuses on the inappropriateness of thediscourse contexts used in previous research. Crain et al. (1996) make asimilar proposal. Both call attention to a felicity condition on the use oflinguistic expressions in contexts that call for a (potentially negative)judgment. The particular felicity condition that inspired these researchers hasa long and venerable history, dating back to Russell (1948). It was called

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‘plausible denial’ by Wason (1965). The same line of reasoning was extendedby Freeman et al. (1982) and by Crain et al. (1996) to explain children’s non-adult behavior in studies that evoked symmetrical responses by children. Letus stick with the Freeman et al. proposal, for the moment. They contend thatsymmetrical responses are produced because children attempt to follow a“conventional rule for interpreting quantified expressions,” which is floutedin the experiments that evoke non-adult responses from children:

“When a speaker asks a question about the presence of ‘all the Xs’, he isimplicitly requesting the hearer to carry out an exhaustive search to check thatno X is missing. Asking someone such a question is only legitimate ‘socio-dialogically’ if there is at least the possibility that some X is (or some Xs are)in actuality missing.” (Freeman et al., 1982; p. 64)

According to Freeman et al. (1982), earlier studies that evoked symmetricalresponses from children (and adults, in some cases) failed to satisfy thefelicity conditions associated with sentences with the universal quantifier,because the context did not include the possibility that some element in therelevant set was “in actuality missing.” As a consequence of this infelicity,children were led to override the meaning provided by their grammars inorder to provide a plausible interpretation of the questions. To derive aplausible interpretation of sentences with the construction ‘all the Xs’,children were compelled to modify their mental model of the discoursecontext, by mentally conjuring up additional entities, beyond those that aredepicted in Figure 1, for example. As Freeman et al. put it:

"If the hearer’s task is to check the context for cues which might indicate theabsence of one of the items, then there is a conventional discourse bias towardsgiving a negative reply. Effectively the situation provides a context forplausible denial (Wason 1965) in view of the speaker’s apparent concern thatnothing is missing." … ‘all the Xs’ is taken to mean ‘all the Xs which ought tobe present’ or ‘all the Xs which the speaker intends to be present.’ … Henceanswering a question about ‘all the Xs’ is likely to entail ignoring irrelevant Xsand searching for cues which indicate a missing X.” (Freeman et al., 1982; p.64-65).

If this is correct, then children’s non-adult behavior is simply due to thedifficulty they experience in responding to sentences in infelicitous contexts.This means that there is just one difference in the linguistic skills of childrenand those of adults — adults are apparently better able to ignore infelicitiesthan children are. By minimizing the differences in the language apparatus ofchildren and adults, Freeman et al. (1982) and Crain et al. (1996) try to avoidthe potential pitfalls of a linguistic analysis of children’s non-adult behavior,such as the Event Quantificational account: children’s grammars would belearnable; they would obey compositionality (where adult grammars do), andthey would adhere to putative universal properties of determiner meanings

8 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

(including conservativity). In short, children and adults would access thesame UG-based linguistic analysis of sentences with the universal quantifier.

The proposal by Crain et al. is similar in spirit to Freeman et al.(1982). The two accounts differ, however, in that according to Crain et al.(1996), the infelicity of a question like Is every boy riding an elephant? doesnot follow from the use of the universal quantifier. Rather, the infelicityderives from posing the question in a context that does not leave room forany alternative outcome. Thus, Crain et al. (1996) suggest that a question likeIs every boy riding an elephant? is felicitous, for example, if one of the boyscould have chosen to ride something else, a donkey say.

To assess the role of the felicity condition under discussion, Crain etal. (1996) introduced a new feature of experimental design.II For Crain et al.the condition of Plausible Dissent takes the form of a research strategy tomake it appropriate to ask yes/no questions, e.g., Is every boy riding anelephant?. As Freeman et al. observed, one poses a question about ‘all theXs’ only if there is “at least the possibility that some X is (or some Xs are) inactuality missing.” The ‘extra’ elephant in Figure 1 provides a furtherencouragement to children to infer the existence of a boy who is not presentin the picture. Children who go to the trouble to make this inference willproduce negative replies to the question. Of course, such responses areinhibited if there is no ‘extra’ elephant or if there are too many ‘extra’elephants (because, in that case, children are less likely to infer that thespeaker thinks that there is a large number of boys missing). Nevertheless,the question remains odd in both such circumstances.III

Children should also produce correct adult-like responses, with evengreater consistency, in circumstances that satisfy the condition of PlausibleDissent. As we noted, for example, the question Is every boy riding anelephant? would be felicitous if some boy(s) considered riding a donkey,even if, in the end, every boy rode an elephant. In such a circumstance,children would be expected to produce appropriate “Yes” answers as often asadults do. This way of satisfying the condition of Plausible Dissent is easilyimplemented into one experimental technique, the Truth Value Judgmenttask.

In a Truth Value Judgment task, the child subject watches stories,acted out by one experimenter, alongside a puppet being manipulated by asecond experimenter. At the end of each story, the puppet tells the child whathe thinks happened in the story. The child’s task is to decide whether thepuppet “said the right thing.” It soon becomes clear to the child that thepuppet does not watch the stories closely, and sometimes fails to describe theactual outcome of the story. If the child decides the puppet was right,however, she rewards him with a prized possession (e.g., a coin). But, if thechild decides the puppet was wrong, she gives him a reward of lesser value

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(e.g., a jewel), as a ‘reminder’ to pay closer attention to the next story.Whenever the child says that the puppet was wrong, the child is asked toexplain “what really happened?” This follow-up maneuver enables theexperimenter to ensure that the child recalls the details of the story and thatshe has rejected the puppet’s statement for the relevant reasons.

Using the Truth Value Judgment task, Crain et al. (1996) conducteda series of experiments to assess children’s comprehension of the universalquantifier every. Several of the experiments satisfied the felicity conditionassociated with the test sentences. The finding was that children performed aswell as adults in interpreting sentences containing the universal quantifier inthese experiments. Crain et al. (1996) conclude that the improvement inchildren’s performance resulted from the satisfaction of the felicityconditions associated with judgments of truth or falsity and that children’snon-adult behavior in previous research was due to the failure to satisfy thosefelicity conditions, rather than to any difference between child and adultgrammar.

2. THE CURRENT DEBATE

2.1. The Plausibility of Plausible Dissent

The condition of Plausible Dissent, and the general notion of felicity, hasbeen widely criticized in the literature on child language. Researchers haveargued that it is vague, unfalsifiable, and lacks independent empiricalsupport. Here are two representative statements.

“It attempts to explain the conditioning of a strange phenomenon by means ofan equally strange hypothesis. They do not define what they mean by ‘felicity’.… Moreover utterances are never felicitous or infelicitous per se. This is notaltogether surprising since there are no in principle falsifiable theories bymeans of which one can measure the ‘felicity value’ of an utterance. There areonly intuitions about felicity…”. (Philip, 1996; p. 572)

“Contrary to what Crain et al. contend, it is doubtful that a yes/no question ispragmatically infelicitous unless both the affirmative and the negative answerare ‘under consideration’ in any substantial sense. In my own experience,children are rather good at answering all manner of questions that would beinfelicitous according to Crain et al.” (Geurts, 2001; p. 5)

These quotes question the account of children’s non-adult responsesproposed by Crain et al. (1996), and by Freeman et al. (1982). We willtherefore take this opportunity to clarify the account, though it should beunderstood that the main thrust of this line of research has been to questionthe need for a linguistic analysis of children’s behavior, rather than to provide

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a non-linguistic analysis of children’s behavior. That said, it will be useful toplace the condition of Plausible Dissent in a broader perspective.

As indicated earlier, the condition of Plausible Dissent is anextension of the observation by Bertrand Russell (1948) that a negativejudgment is felicitous only if the alternative positive judgment has beenunder consideration. One kind of linguistic expression that requires apotentially negative judgment is a yes/no question. If the answer (either “yes”or “no”) is already known, the hearer is likely to infer that what the speakerintends is not conveyed by the literal meaning of the question. As anexample, consider the following question, which is a familiar joke in Italian:

(3) What color was Napoleon’s white horse?

Italians who are asked this question often take a long time to respond, tryingto recall relevant facts from their high school classes in French history. Thisdelay reveals that people do not expect questions to contain their ownanswers.

The same point can be put more formally, drawing upon work byRobert Stalnaker (1999). In a discussion of the role of assertions inconversational exchanges, Stalnaker states that “assertions affect, and areintended to affect the context” (Stalnaker, 1999, p. 78). The ‘context’ at issueis the conversational or discourse context. The participants who are engagedin a conversation bring with them a shared set of beliefs or assumptions,which Stalnaker calls the common ground (also see Heim, 1982). T h ecommon ground includes propositions that have not been challenged orwithdrawn by any of the participants in the conversation. As the conversationprogresses, new propositions are added to the common ground. If aproposition is inconsistent with what is already included in the commonground, either that proposition is rejected or some proposition contained inthe common ground is abandoned. So, at each stage during a conversation,the common ground contains a set of coherent and connected propositions.Adopting a different terminology, the common ground is a set of possibleworlds, possible situations, or live possibilities:

“A live possibility at a given discourse stage is any circumstances v such thatall the propositions in the common ground at that point of the discourse are truein v”. (Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, 2000; p. 216)

The role of an assertion in discourse is to reduce the set of live possibilities:an assertion eliminates all propositions that are incompatible with it. Amongthe principles that regulate the interaction of assertions and the commonground, Stalnaker (1999) introduces the principle in (4):

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(4) “A proposition asserted is always true in some but not all of thepossible worlds in the context set.” (p.88) IV

As (4) makes clear, a speaker is not expected to assert a proposition that isalready part of the common ground. If a speaker violates this rule, he hasdone “something that, from the point of view of the conversation, wasunreasonable, inefficient, disorderly, or uncooperative” (ibid p. 89).The role of a yes/no question in a conversation is similar. It is an attempt bythe speaker to reduce, by half, the set of live possibilities. Roughly, a yes/noquestion and its corresponding answer, taken together, can be viewed as anassertion that such-and-such is, or is not, the case. NEEDS WORKTherefore, question/answer pairs should be governed by the principle in (4): ayes/no question is “unreasonable, inefficient, disorderly, uncooperative,” if itsanswers are already contained in the common ground. The condition ofPlausible Dissent is designed to introduce a possible outcome in the storiespresented to children, in addition to the actual outcome. By satisfying thecondition of Plausible Dissent, the experimenter ensures that the principle in(4) is met for the propositions that children are asked to judge.

2.2. Empirical Support for the Felicity Account

Another objection to the account advocated by Freeman et al. (1982) andCrain et al. (1996) is that the failure to satisfy felicity conditions is nottroublesome for older children and adults. This creates a learnability problem,it is claimed:

“…their diagnosis still leaves open some of the most intriguing issues raised bythe empirical facts. Why is it, for example, that older children and adults aren’tbothered by an experimental set-up that, by Crain et al’s lights, is hopelesslyflawed?” (Geurts, 2001; p. 5)

“On their account, a child has extremely nonadult-like notions of ‘felicity’.How does the child acquire adult-like notions of ‘felicity’ then?” (Philip, 1996;p. 572)

In our view, the main point of the accounts by Freeman et al. and by Crain etal. is to minimize the differences in the language apparatus of children andadults, including discourse principles. We have already seen that adults canbe induced to commit errors like those children make. The difference is amatter of degree. To underscore this point, we review two recentexperimental investigations of how adults are influenced by changes in theconversational context.

The first study was by Guasti and Chierchia (2000), who studied theinterpretation assigned by children and adults to sentences governed byPrinciple C of the binding theory. One of the findings of the Guasti and

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Chierchia study was that adults accepted violations of Principle C, insentences like (5), significantly more often when the condition of PlausibleDissent was satisfied than when it was not satisfied.

(5) Andava sul cavallo a dondolo mentre un musicista suonava.‘went-3SG on-the horse rocking while a musician played-3SG’He was riding a rocking horse while a musician was playing

For example, adults failed to reject referential dependence between u nmusicista and the implicit subject, as dictated by Principle C, if the story didnot provide a possible outcome in which a salient character considered ridinga rocking horse while the musician was playing; there was only a 41% rate ofrejection. In stories that did provide this possible outcome, adults rejected thetest sentences 94% of the time, revealing knowledge of Principle C.

The second study was conducted in our own laboratory, where weexamined the influence of the condition of Plausible Dissent on adult’sinterpretation of sentences with the universal quantifier, using a free headeye-tracking system (Meroni, Crain and Gualmini, 2001; Meroni 2002). Eye-movements were monitored on-line, as subjects verified sentences that werepaired with visually present scenes. We analyzed the pattern of eye-movements and the fixation durations that were associated with variousobjects depicted in the scenes. With a scene in front of them, subjects wereasked to judge whether the test sentence was an accurate description of thescene. In evaluating a sentence like Every boy is riding an elephant weanticipated that subjects would fixate longer on the ‘extra’ elephant in apicture like Figure 1, than they would in an alternative scene that depictedanother object, e.g., a horse, in addition to the ‘extra’ elephant as in Figure 2.This is precisely what was found. Fixation durations on ‘extra’ objects weresignificantly longer in response to pictures like Figure 1 than in thealternative condition. We interpret these results as evidence that subjectswere mentally attempting to satisfy the condition of Plausible Dissent, butwere unable to in response to scenes like Figure 1.

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Figure 2. The Plausible Dissent Condition

These findings are consistent with the proposal that children andadults have equivalent cognitive mechanisms. The fact that adults aresensitive to the same felicity conditions as children casts doubts on the claimthat children have a “nonadult-like notion of felicity” (Philip, 1996; p. 572).Therefore, one can continue to embrace the non-linguistic account ofchildren’s nonadult responses in earlier studies. By minimizing differences inthe cognitive mechanisms of children and adults, one avoids the kinds oflearnability problems that confront linguistic accounts of children’s non-adultresponses, such as the Event Quantification account. We continue to stick toour original claim, therefore, that young children are subject to the samediscourse constraints as adults and older children; younger children are justless successful in making the necessary accommodations when discourseprinciples are flouted.

2.3. The Salience Account

An alternative explanation of the improvement in children’s performance inthe Crain et al. study has emerged in recent work (e.g., Gordon, 1996; Drozdand van Loosbroek, 1999a; Krämer, 2000; Philip and Lynch, 2000; Geurts,2001). The alternative accounts of children’s improved responses attributethem to the salience of the objects that figure into children’s interpretation ofsentences like Every boy is riding an elephant. When children’s attention isdrawn to the set denoted by the object noun (e.g., the elephants), childrenassign one interpretation, yielding non-adult responses. When children focuson the set denoted by the subject noun (e.g., the boys), however, childrenassign another interpretation, yielding adult-like responses. Despite someminor differences in detail, we will lump these various accounts together,calling them the Salience account. Here are a few excerpts from studies thatadvocate the Salience account:

“… it could be hypothesized that the reason that children ignored the extra[objects] in the latter study [Crain et al. 1996] is simply that the [extra objects]were backgrounded and did not figure significantly in the story. On the otherhand, when the extra [objects] are presented statically…, they are foregroundedand likely to distract the child into thinking they are relevant.” (Gordon, 1996;p. 217)

14 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

“But the contexts in [Figure 1] fail to invite children to represent the set ofboys in the visual context as discourse-active. In addition, the visual context in[Figure 1] makes it easy for children (and adults) to represent the set ofelephants or elephant-riders as discourse active.” (Drozd and van Loosbroek,1999a; p. 189)

“Crain et al.’s (1996) experimental findings may have been an artifact of subtlemanipulations of relevance. Their subjects may have shown highly adult-grammatical performance in their second experiment session simply becausethe extra object-which the child must notice if she is to give a nonadultresponse-was inadvertently made highly irrelevant”. (Philip and Lynch, 2000;p. 589)

“children do better on Crain et al’s stories simply because they provide clearcontextual support for the presuppositional interpretationV of a universalquantifier…Children largely abandon exhaustive pairing [symmetricalresponse] on this condition because the intended restriction for the universalquantifier … was presented to them before the universally quantifiedproposition.” (Drozd and van Loosbroek, 1999b; p. 15)

The Salience account carries with it much of the theoretical baggagethat weighed down the Event Quantification account. On this account,children lack adult linguistic competence in interpreting sentences with theuniversal quantifier every, children’s grammars assign more than one analysisto such sentences, so one analysis must be ‘unlearned’; children’s grammarsviolate compositionality on the non-adult interpretation, and they violateconservativity on that interpretation -- a putatively universal constraint ondeterminer meanings.VI

We would not deny that salience plays an important role in languageunderstanding. For example, quantificational adverbs have the flexibility totarget different indefinite noun phrases, depending on the theme-rhemestructure of the discourse. Salience is not a relevant factor for the kinds ofunambiguous sentences under discussion, however. As in the adult grammar,if children’s grammars assign a single interpretation to a sentence like Everyboy is riding an elephant, then that is what the sentence means, regardless ofthe discourse topic. Like adults, children may be compelled in certaincircumstances to abandon the literal meaning of a sentence, if the assignmentof that meaning makes the sentence pragmatically odd, but such problemsshould arise only in circumstances that do not adhere to principles ofdiscourse; these problems should not arise in run-of-the-mill discoursecontexts.

Based on these observations, we expect children to access thecorrect interpretation of sentences like Every boy is riding an elephantwhenever discourse principles are satisfied, regardless of the salience of theobjects denoted by the different NPs in the sentence. In fact, studies reportedin Crain et al. (1996) did attempt to control for salience, in two ways: (a) by

EVERYBODY KNOWS 15

“highlighting” the set of objects during the story and (b) by mentioning themat the end of each trial, thereby directing children’s attention to the ‘extra’object (see Crain et al., 1996; p. 125). Nevertheless, the issue of felicityversus salience is worth pursuing, because the Salience account has beeninvoked by several researchers to motivate linguistic accounts of children’snon-adult performance.

To pit the Felicity account against the Salience account, weconducted an experiment using the Truth Value Judgment task (See Meroni,Gualmini and Crain, 2000). In the experiment, the objects in the denotationof the object noun were made highly salient and, at the same time, thecondition of Plausible Dissent was satisfied. If salience is the critical factor,then a non-adult interpretation of the quantifier every are expected to emergein the study, as in previous research. If children’s non-adult responses surfaceonly in infelicitous tasks, however, then children are expected to respond tothe test sentences in the same way as adults do, regardless of the salience ofthe denotation of the object noun. In a typical trial, children were told a storyabout a rodeo competition. The story involved three farmers, four horses andtwo dinosaurs. When the set of characters is introduced to the child subject, itis pointed out that one of the four horses has no saddle and is probably a wildhorse. Each farmer has to choose an animal to ride in the rodeo. Here is howthe storyline unfolded in real time. One farmer considers riding a dinosaur,because he knows he will win the competition if he can ride a dinosaur. Butthe dinosaur is quite angry, so the farmer decides to ride one of the horses(the condition of Plausible Dissent is satisfied when the farmer considersriding a dinosaur). First, he considers riding the wild horse, but the horseproves to be unfriendly, so the farmer decides to ride one of the other horses.In the remainder of the story, the two remaining farmers also consider ridinga dinosaur and the wild horse, but they too realize the risks involved in ridingthese animals. In the end every farmer rides a ‘regular’ horse. When the storyis completed, the child can see in the experimental workspace that everyfarmer is riding a horse and also that no farmer chose to ride the wild horse(keeping the wild horse salient in the experimental workspace). At theconclusion of the story, the puppet, Kermit the Frog, produced the targetsentence, preceded by a linguistic antecedent, as illustrated in (5).

(6) This was a story about three farmers, two dinosaurs and fourhorses and one of them was a wild horse! I know whathappened. Every farmer rode a horse.

Sixteen children ranging in age between 3;10 to 6;3 (mean age: 5;1)participated in the experiment. Each child was presented with one warm-up,two fillers and three target sentences. The results are unexpected under the

16 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

hypothesis that the salience of the denotation of the object noun is the criticalfactor in children’s judgments. Children rarely produced non-adult responses,regardless of the salience of the denotation of the object N. The child subjectscorrectly accepted sentences like Every farmer rode a horse on 43 out of 48trials (90%). These results show that the satisfaction of felicity conditions,rather than salience, determines children’s (adult-like) responses, when eachfactor meets the other head on.

2.4. The Weak Quantification Account

So far, we have introduced three accounts of children’s failures inunderstanding of the universal quantifier every. We will review one morelinguistic account, called the Weak Quantification account. The WeakQuantification account was advanced by Drozd and van Loosbroek(1999a,b). The account incorporates the Salience Account, but it makes anumber of further theoretical assumptions that are worth closer examination,to illustrate the value of linguistic principles in constraining children’sgrammatical hypotheses. One relevant linguistic principle has emerged inresearch on formal semantics. It is widely acknowledged that all determinermeanings share a core set of properties. One of these properties is known asconservativity, or the ‘lives on’ relation. Beginning with the work of Barwiseand Cooper (1981) and Keenan and Stavi (1986), it has been recognized thatdeterminer meanings are conservative functions, according to the followingdefinition:

(7) A determiner meaning is conservative iff:Y ∈ DET(X) iff Y _ X ∈ DET(X)(where X, Y are sets, DET is a function from sets into set ofsets, and _ = set intersection)

According to the definition in (7), determiners verify inferences of thefollowing kind: D(A)(B) ⇔ D(A)(A _ B), thereby making the followinginferences valid.

(8) a. Few Americans smoke ⇔ Few Americans are Americanswho smoke.b. Every Italian eats pasta ⇔ Every Italian is an Italian whoeats pasta.c. No German drinks Bud ⇔ No German is a German whodrinks Bud.

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The meaning of one determiner, the quantifier many, has resisted beinglabeled as conservative. The troublesome observation about many can beillustrated with the following example, due to Westerståhl (1985).

(9) Many Scandinavians have won the Nobel Prize in literature.

This sentence is assumed to have two readings. On one reading, thenumerical value of many is estimated on the basis of the denotation of thesubject noun, i.e., the set of Scandinavians. This is called thePresuppositional interpretation. A paraphrase of the Presuppositionalinterpretation is given in (10).

(10) Many Scandinavians are Scandinavians who won the NobelPrize in Literature.

On a second reading, the numerical value of many is estimated on the basis ofthe set denoted by the verbal phrase (VP), i.e., the set of the Nobel Prizewinners in Literature. This is called the Existential interpretation and isparaphrased in (11).

(11) Many of the prize-winners are prize-winners who areScandinavian

The reading in (11) constitutes a problem for the hypothesis that all naturallanguages determiners are conservative.VII More precisely, the conclusionthat the determiner many violates conservativity derives, in part, from theobservation that English speakers judge (12) (a shortened version of (9)) tobe true in circumstances in which they judge (13) to be false, while thediagnostic for conservativity suggests that (12) and (13) should be true in thesame circumstances.

(12) Many Scandinavians are prize winners.

(13) Many Scandinavians are Scandinavians who are prize winners.

A detailed discussion of the properties of the quantifier many is beyond thescope of this paper. It is pertinent to observe, however, that the judgmentsabove do not necessarily involve a violation of conservativity. As Meroni,Gualmini and Crain (2000) observe, (14) is logically equivalent to (13) as a

18 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

diagnostic of conservativity; but people judge (14) to be true in the samecircumstances as (12).

(14) Many Scandinavians are prize winners who are Scandinavians.

This suggests that the form of (12), that is the order of noun phrases, givesthe illusion that many is not conservative in sentences like (9). Barwise andCooper (1981) make a related observation.

Putting aside these considerations, let us consider how Drozd andvan Loosbroek (1999) extends the observations about many to the universalquantifier every. According to Drozd and van Loosbroek, children’s non-adult responses in previous studies derive from the fact that, on a par withmany, the quantifier every is ambiguous in children’s grammars. In otherwords, every and many behave in a similar way for 4- and 5-year-oldchildren. As a consequence, a sentence like Every boy is riding an elephantwill be interpreted in different ways, depending on the set that every appliesto. When children apply every to the set denoted by the subject noun, thenthey produce adult-like responses.

On the Weak Quantification account, children’s errors arise for thissentence when the set denoted by the subject noun, the boys, is not madesalient in the context. In such circumstances, children apply every to the setdenoted by the VP (elephant riders); the result is the non-adult interpretationand, hence, the symmetrical response. Children estimate the number of boys(denoted by every boy) that should be riding elephants on the expectedfrequency of elephant riders (the VP). Suppose the context contains fourelephants and three boys, as in Figure 1. With every having scope over theVP, there must be enough boys in the set denoted by every boy to ride all fourelephants. In such context, the set denoted by every boy is short by one boy.On the other hand, when children’s attention is drawn to the denotation of thesubject noun (the boys), every takes scope over this set, and children produceadult-like responses.

(togliere?)Our concerns with the Weak Quantification account aresimilar to those raised in response to the Event Quantification account. First,the VP ‘is riding an elephant’ must be structurally recast by children, in orderfor the analysis to provide the truth conditions associated with theexhaustive-pairing response. The VP must be interpreted as if it had adifferent syntactic structure, such as that corresponding to “is ridden by aboy” or “what a boy is riding.” This kind of restructuring violatescompositionality. If the Weak Quantification account is correct, whereasadults assign a compositional (and conservative) interpretation for sentenceswith the determiner every, children access a non-compositional (and non-conservative) interpretation, in addition to the adult interpretation.

EVERYBODY KNOWS 19

On the Weak Quantification account, then, children assign (at least)two meanings to sentences with the universal quantifier and a transitive VP,whereas adults assign only one. This raises the, now familiar, problem oflearnability. It is difficult to see how children could jettison the non-adultsemantic representation from their grammars, because parental input isalways consistent with one of children’s interpretations, namely the adultinterpretation. Another concern is empirical adequacy. On the Drozd and vanLoosbroek account, the non-adult analysis brings the set denoted by theobject noun into the restrictor of every. Therefore, the presence of extra-agents (in the set denoted by the subject noun) should not be relevant inverifying these sentences. The account predicts, therefore, that childrenshould accept Every boy is riding an elephant even if there are extra-agents,i.e., boys who are not riding elephants.

This prediction was examined in an experiment by Meroni et al.(2000) (also see Philip, 1995, for discussion of previous research thatdisconfirms this prediction). As we saw, the Weak Quantification accountanticipates that children will accept a sentence like Every boy is riding anelephant in a context in which there is a boy who is not riding an elephant, aslong as every elephant is being ridden by a boy. We call this the extra-agentcondition. The extra-agent condition was constructed using pictures in thepresent study, to evaluate the proposal by Drozd and van Loosbroek usingtheir own methodology.

Two experimenters participated in the study. One presented picturesto the child and to Kermit the Frog, the puppet who was manipulated by thesecond experimenter. On each trial the first experimenter directed the child’sattention to the set denoted by the object noun, in order to encourage thechild to access the non-adult interpretation if this reading is made availableby the child’s grammar. Then, Kermit described the picture. The child’s taskwas to judge whether or not Kermit’s description was correct. To illustrate,on one trial the child was presented with the picture of four tigers and threeballoons. Only three of the four tigers were holding a balloon, so there was an‘extra’ tiger in the picture. The experimenter pointed to each of the balloons,and then made a special point of the fact that there was a beautiful butterflyon each balloon (see Figure 3). In this way, the set denoted by the objectnoun was made highly salient. Children were then asked to evaluate thesentence in (15), produced by Kermit the Frog:

20 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

Figure 3 - The Extra-Agent Condition

(15) Every tiger is holding a balloon.

Nineteen children, ranging in age between 3;08 and 5;10 (mean age: 4,11),participated in the experiment. Each child was presented with three targetsentences and two fillers. The children correctly rejected the target sentences46 times out of 51 trials (90%). In short, children did not behave as predictedby the Weak Quantification account, in the extra-agent condition.

5. CONCLUSION

A central question in child language is whether possible mismatches betweenchildren and adults are due to a non-adult linguistic analysis, or to non-linguistic factors that adults are also sensitive to. We have argued in favor ofa non-linguistic account of children’s behavior that invokes the samediscourse principles that govern adult performance. We would challenge, ongrounds of parsimony, any account of children’s behavior that does notcomport with principles that are also known to influence adults. We havepresented the findings of two new experiments that are consistent with theview that the source of children’s ‘errors’ lies outside the language faculty.

In recent work, we have been exploring, from a different angle, theempirical predictions of the competing accounts of children’s interpretationof sentences with the universal quantifier. One prediction that is common tothe Event Quantification account and the Weak Quantification account is thatthe scope of the universal quantifier extends beyond its internal argument, toinclude its external argument as well. The upshot is that asymmetriesbetween the internal and external arguments of the UQ should be blurred inchild grammars, if either of these accounts is correct. However, if children’s

EVERYBODY KNOWS 21

errors are the artifacts of experimental infelicities, as we maintain, thenchildren are expected to observe the same differences in interpretation thatarise in the two arguments of the universal quantifier in adult languages.

GIVE EXAMPLE and REFER READER To Sinn und Bedeutung paper.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank the children, staff and teachers at the Center for YoungChildren at the University of Maryland at College Park and Lia Gravelle forher assistance as puppeteer. We also thank Nadia Shihab for reading themanuscript. We are especially indebted to Paul Pietroski for extensivediscussion of the issues raised in this paper.

University of Maryland at College Park

7. NOTES

I We follow the literature in calling “symmetrical” children’s responses to sentencescontaining an intransitive verb, as in Every boy is riding. In this case one can describe childrenbehavior by saying that they demand a symmetry between the set of boys and the set of entitiesthat could be ridden.II. Crain and Thornton (1998) refer to this as the condition of plausible dissent, to contrast itwith another feature of experimental design called the condition of plausible assent.III See Sugisaki and Isobe (2000) and Gouro, Norita, Nakajima and Ariji (2001) forexperimental evidence that confirms this prediction.VI The context set is the set of propositions which constitute the live options relevant to theconversation.V I.e., the adult interpretation.VI We would not hold all advocates of the Salience account to each of these claims; however,this is our reading of the work by Philip and Lynch (2000), Drozd and van Loosbroek (1998),and Geurts (2000).VII See Meroni, Gualmini and Crain, (2000) for further details.

8. REFERENCES ADD GOURO, SUGISAKI AND 895

Barwise, John, and Robin Cooper. “Generalized quantifiers and naturallanguage.” Linguistics and Philosophy 4 (1981): 159-219.

Chierchia Gennaro, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. Meaning and Grammar 2ded. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2000.

Crain, Stephen. “Sense and sense ability in child language.” Proceedings ofthe 24th Boston University Conference on Language Development, 22-44.Somerville, MA.: Cascadilla Press, 2000.

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Crain, Stephen, and Cecile McKee. “The acquisition of structural restrictionson anaphora.” Proceedings of NELS 15, 94-110. Amherst, MA.: GLSA,1985.

Crain, Stephen, and Paul Pietroski. “Nature, Nurture and UniversalGrammar.” Linguistics and Philosophy 24 (2001): 139-186.

Crain, Stephen, and Rosalind Thornton. Investigations in UniversalGrammar. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1998.

Crain, Stephen, Rosalind Thornton, Carol Boster, Laura Conway, DianeLillo-Martin, and Elaine Woodams. “Quantification withoutqualification.” Language Acquisition 5 (1996): 83-153.

Drozd, Kenneth, and Erik van Loosbroek. “Weak quantification, plausibledissent, and the development of children’s pragmatic competence.”Proceedings of the 23rd Boston University Conference on LanguageDevelopment, 184-195. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Drozd, Kenneth and Erik van Loosbroek. 1999b. The effect of context onchildren’s interpretation of universally quantified sentences. Ms., MaxPlanck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Nijmegen University,Nijmegen.

Freeman Norman H., C.G. Sinha and Jacqueline A. Stedmon. 1982. All thecars –which cars? From word to meaning to discourse analysis. InMichael Beveridge (ed.) Children thinking through language, 52-74.London: Edward Arnold Publisher.

Freeman Norman H. and Jacqueline A. Stedmon (1986). How children dealwith natural language quantification. In Ida Kurcz, Grace Wales Shugarand Joseph H. Danks (eds.) Knowledge and Language. 21-48.Amsterdam: Elesevier Science Publishers.

Geurts, Bart. 2001. Quantifying Kinds. Ms., Humboldt University, Berlin andNijmegen University, Nijmegen..

Gordon, Peter. 1996. The Truth Value Judgment Task. In Dana McDaniel,Cecile McKee and Helen Smith Cairns (eds.) Methods for AssessingChildren’s Syntax, 211-231. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Guasti, Maria Teresa and Gennaro Chierchia. 2000. Backward VersusForward anaphora: Reconstruction in Child Grammar. LanguageAcquisition, 8, 129-170.

Heim, Irene. 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases.Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Inhelder, Barbel and Jean Piaget. 1964. The early growth of logic in the child.London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul.

James, William. 1892. Psychology. Harper and Brothers, New York.Keenan, Edward L. and Jonathan Stavi. 1986. A semantic characterization of

natural language determiners. Linguistics and Philosophy, 9, 253-- 326.

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Krämer, Irene. Interpreting Indefinites. An experimental Study of Children’sLanguage comprehension. PhD Dissertation, MPI Series. Wageningen:Ponsen &Looijen.

Locke, John. 1690. An Essay concerning human understanding. London.Meroni, Luisa, Andrea Gualmini and Stephen Crain. 2000. A conservative

approach to quantification in child language. In Proceedings of the 24th

Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Philadelphia, UPenn.Meroni, Luisa, Stephen Crain and Andrea Gualmini. 2001. “Felicity

Conditions and On-line Interpretation of Sentence with Quantified NPs”,paper presented at the 14th Annual CUNY Conference on HumanSentence Processing, March 15th-17th, 2001. Philadelphia, , University ofPennsylvania.

Philip, William. 1995. Event quantification in the acquisition of universalquantification. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts,Amherst.

Philip, William. 1996. The Event Quantificational Account of SymmetricalInterpretation and a Denial of implausible Infelicity. In Proceedings of the20th Boston University Conference on Language Development, 564-575.Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Philip, William and Emily Lynch. 2000. Felicity, Relevance, and Acquisitionof the Grammar of Every and Only. In Proceedings of the 24th BostonUniversity Conference on Language Development, 583-596. Somerville,MA: Cascadilla Press.

Roeper, Tom and Jill de Villiers. 1991. The Emergence of Bound VariableStructures. In T. Maxfield and Plunket (eds.) University of MassachusettsOccasional Papers: Papers in the Acqusition of WH, 267-282. Amherts,MA: GLSA

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Stalnaker Robert C.(1999. Context and Content. Oxford Univerity PressWesterståhl, Dag. 1985. Logical constants in quantifier languages.

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24 L. MERONI, A. GUALMINI AND S. CRAIN

Figure 1 – The extra-object condition

Figure 2 – The extra-agent condition

I We follow the literature in calling “symmetrical” children’s responsesto sentences containing an intransitive verb, as in Every boy is riding.In this case one can describe children behavior by saying that theydemand a symmetry between the set of boys and the set of entitiesthat could be ridden.II Crain and Thornton (1998) refer to this as the condition of plausibledissent, to contrast it with another feature of experimental designcalled the condition of plausible assent.III See Sugisaki and Isobe (2000) and Gouro, Norita, Nakajima andAriji (2001) for experimental evidence that confirms this prediction.IV The context set is the set of propositions which constitute the liveoptions relevant to the conversation.V I.e., the adult interpretation.VI We would not hold all advocates of the Salience account to each ofthese claims; however, this is our reading of the work by Philip andLynch (2000), Drozd and van Loosbroek (1998), and Geurts (2000).VII See Meroni, Gualmini and Crain, 2000 for further details.