Children’s command of quantification Jeffrey Lidz a,1 , Julien Musolino b,1, * a Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, 2016 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL 60208-4090, USA b Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, 200 S. Jordan Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405-7002, USA Received 16 December 2001; received in revised form 2 January 2002; accepted 8 February 2002 Abstract In this article we present data from two sets of experiments designed to investigate how children and adult speakers of English and Kannada (Dravidian) interpret scopally ambiguous sentences containing numerally quantified noun phrases and negation (e.g. Donald didn’t find two guys). We use this kind of sentence as a way to find evidence in children’s linguistic representations for the hierarchical structure and the abstract relations defined over these structures (in particular, the relation of c-command) that linguists take to be at the core of grammatical knowledge. Specifically, we uncover the existence of systematic differences in the way that children and adult speakers resolve these ambiguities, independent of the language they speak. That is, while adults can easily access either scope interpretation, 4-year-old children display a strong preference for the scopal interpretation of the quantified elements which corresponds to their surface syntactic position. Crucially, however, we show that children’s interpretations are constrained by the surface hierarch- ical relations (i.e. the c-command relations) between these elements and not by their linear order. Children’s non-adult interpretations are therefore informative about the nature of the syntactic representations they entertain and the rules they use to determine the meaning of a sentence from its structure. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Language acquisition; Cross-linguistic; Ambiguity resolution; Quantifier scope; Negation; C- command; Kannada 1. Introduction In this paper we investigate children’s knowledge of the linguistic principles governing the interpretation of the quantificational expressions of their language (e.g. no man, two Cognition 84 (2002) 113–154 www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit 0010-0277/02/$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0010-0277(02)00013-6 COGNITION * Corresponding author. Fax: 11-812-855-5531. E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Musolino). 1 The authors are engaged in a continuing collaboration in which the order of names alternates from one paper to the next. The authors contributed equally to the work reported here.
Children’s command of quantificationsemantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s09/experimentalsemantic… · children’s non-adult behavior in tasks involving the comprehension of
