Bart Hollebrandse

Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers.

Significance Although much research has been devoted to the acquisition of number words, relatively little is known about the acquisition of other expressions of quantity. We propose that the order of acquisition of quantifiers is related to features inherent to the meaning of each term. Four specific dimensions of the meaning and use of quantifiers are found to capture robust similarities in the order of acquisition of quantifiers in similar ways across 31 languages, representing 11 language types. Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier’s specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for “all,” “none,” “some,” “some…not,” and “most” in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language- and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.

Recursive Complements and Propositional Attitudes

The focus of this chapter is in what role syntactic recursion might play in the representation of propositional attitudes. Syntactic complements under mental and communication verbs are recursive, and so also are the propositional attitudes. There is strong evidence that children take some time to master the first order syntactic complementation typical of verbs of communication. When they do acquire these structures, the evidence suggests that this helps children reason about propositional attitudes such as false beliefs. In this chapter we seek to deepen our understanding of the crucial property of sentential and attitude embedding. Is the crucial aspect that the truth value of the complement differs from that of the embedded clause, or is it that both the sentence forms and the propositional attitudes are recursive? We show that new insight can be gained by examining higher order levels of both sentence embedding and propositional attitudes. Based on some empirical data on second order complements and propositional attitude reasoning in children, we propose that truth contrasts between clauses may provide a crucial trigger for recursive complements.

Children’s ambiguous understanding of weak and strong quantifiers

Despite suggestions in the literature that the semantics of many might be the key for understanding children’s non-adult-like interpretations of quantified sentences (cf. Drozd 2001, Geurts 2003), experimental data on the acquisition of weak quantifiers like many is rare. This paper investigates children’s comprehension of weak ( many ) versus strong ( many of, all ) quantifiers in English. In particular, by means of a truth-value judgment task, taking the semantic and syntactic characteristics of many into account, we tested whether 28 children aged between four and seven understand the ambiguous nature of many as described in the literature (Partee, 1988) and whether they transfer this ambiguity to many of and all . The results show that children have an ambiguous quantifier system for both strong and weak quantifiers. This runs counter the idea that the child always prefers a reading of many in which the arguments seem to ‘switch’ (as for adults in Many French have won the Tour de France , resulting in the interpretation Many Tour de France winners are French), as predicted by Drozd and Van Loosbroek’s (1999) Weak Quantification Hypothesis. On the basis of our experimental results on children’s understanding of both weak and strong quantifiers, we conclude that children’s non-adult interpretations of quantified sentences are due to the ambiguous nature of (weak) quantifiers. This presents the language learner with the difficult, but necessary, task to distinguish between those different kinds of readings and understand their different semantic and syntactic representations in order to converge with the target language.