Lyn Tieu

On the role of alternatives in the acquisition of simple and complex disjunctions in French and Japanese

When interpreting disjunctive sentences of the form ‘A or B,’ young children have been reported to differ from adults in two ways. First, children have been reported to interpret disjunction inclusively rather than exclusively, accepting ‘A or B’ in con- texts in which both A and B are true (Gualmini, Crain, Meroni, Chierchia & Guasti 2001; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti & Thornton 2001). Second, some children have been reported to interpret disjunction conjunctively, rejecting ‘A or B’ in contexts in which only one of the disjuncts is true (Paris 1973; Braine & Rumain 1981; Chierchia, Guasti, Gualmini, Meroni, Crain & Foppolo 2004; Singh, Wexler, Astle, Kamawar & Fox 2015). In this paper, we extend the investigation of children’s interpretation of disjunction to include both simple and complex forms of disjunction, in two typologically unrelated languages: French and Japanese. First, given that complex disjunctions have been argued to give rise to obligatory exclusivity inferences (Spector 2014), we investigated whether the obligatoriness of the inference would play a role in the acquisition of the exclusive interpretation. Second, using a paradigm that makes the use of disjunc- tion felicitous, we aimed to establish whether the finding of conjunctive interpretations would be replicated for both simple and complex forms of disjunction, and in languages other than English. The main findings from our experiment are that both French- and Japanese-speaking children interpreted the simple and complex disjunctions either in- clusively or conjunctively; in contrast, adults generally accessed exclusive readings of both disjunctions. We argue that our results lend further support to the proposal put forth in Singh et al. (2015), according to which the reason some children compute conjunctive meanings while adults compute exclusive meanings is that the two groups differ in their respective sets of alternatives for disjunction. Crucially, adults access conjunction as an alternative to disjunction, and compute exclusive interpretations; in contrast, children access only the individual disjuncts as alternatives, and therefore either interpret the disjunction literally or compute conjunctive inferences. More gen- erally, our findings can be explained quite naturally within recent proposals according to which children differ from adults in the computation of scalar inferences because they are more restricted than adults in the set of scalar alternatives they can access (Barner, Brooks & Bale 2011; Tieu, Romoli, Zhou & Crain 2015b, among others).

NPI Licensing and Beyond: Children's Knowledge of the Semantics of "Any".

ABSTRACT This article presents a study of preschool-aged children’s knowledge of the semantics of the negative polarity item (NPI) any. NPIs like any differ in distribution from non-polarity-sensitive indefinites like a: Any is restricted to downward-entailing linguistic environments (Fauconnier 1975, 1979; Ladusaw 1979). But any also differs from plain indefinites in its semantic contribution; any can quantify over wider domains of quantification than plain indefinites. In fact, on certain accounts of NPI licensing, it is precisely the semantics of any that derives its restricted distribution (Kadmon & Landman 1993; Krifka 1995; Chierchia 2006, 2013). While previous acquisition studies have investigated children’s knowledge of the distributional constraints on any (O’Leary & Crain 1994; Thornton 1995; Xiang et al. 2006; Tieu 2010), no previous study has targeted children’s knowledge of the semantics of the NPI. To address this gap in the existing literature, we present an experiment conducted with English-speaking adults and 4–5-year-old children, in which we compare their interpretation of sentences containing any with their interpretation of sentences containing the plain indefinite a and the bare plural. When presented with multiple domain alternatives, one of which was made more salient than the others, both adults and children restricted the domain of quantification for the plain indefinites to the salient subdomain. In the case of any, however, the adults and most of the children that we tested interpreted any as quantifying over the largest domain in the context. We discuss our findings in light of theories of NPI licensing that posit a connection between the distribution of NPIs and their underlying semantics, and conclude by raising further questions about the learnability of NPIs.

Children's exhaustive readings of questions

AbstractQuestions, just like plain declarative sentences, can give rise to multiple interpretations. As discussed by Spector & Egre (2015), among others, questions embedded under know are ambiguous between weakly exhaustive (WE), intermediate exhaustive (IE), and strongly exhaustive (SE) interpretations (for experimental evidence of this ambiguity, see Cremers & Chemla 2014). These three interpretations are related in terms of strength. The SE reading entails both the IE and WE readings, and the IE reading entails the WE reading. Certain proposals derive the stronger readings from weaker ones through the same process of enrichment that underlies scalar implicatures, in particular through comparison with alternatives (Klinedinst & Rothschild 2011). Given previous developmental studies of scalar implicatures that suggest children typically perform this enrichment less often than adults do (Noveck 2001; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti & Thornton 2001; Papafragou & Musolino 2003, among many others), such proposals l...

Isomorphism for All (but Not Both): Floating as a Means to Investigate Scope

This article investigates the so-called isomorphism effect (Musolino 1998; Musolino, Crain & Thornton 2000) in the comprehension of scopally ambiguous sentences containing negation and floating quantifiers. Given that floating quantifiers can appear in up to three surface positions relative to negation, I propose that they provide us with the ideal methodological tool to test for scope ambiguity resolution while holding constant various factors, including: (i) the associated noun phrase, and thereby the relevant thematic roles in the test stories; (ii) the syntactic position of the associated noun phrase, and thereby the relevant interpretive mechanism for achieving either a wide or narrow scope construal; (iii) the discourse contexts in which the test sentences are presented. Using a truth value judgment task, I show that both 4-year-olds and adults display isomorphic preferences in their interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing the floating quantifier all, no matter its surface position. In the case of both, children and adults display a preference for isomorphism only when both precedes negation. Crucially, for both quantifiers, children and adults display the same interpretive preferences, lending further support to the general view that children and adults do not differ in their grammatical representations of such scopally ambiguous sentences (Musolino & Lidz 2003, 2006; Gualmini 2004; Conroy, Lidz & Musolino 2009).

Beyond the scope of acquisition: A novel perspective on the isomorphism effect from Broca’s aphasia

ABSTRACT Children have been reported to prefer the surface scope or “isomorphic” reading of scopally ambiguous sentences (Musolino 1998, among others). Existing accounts in the literature differ with respect to the proposed source of this isomorphism effect. Some accounts are based on learnability considerations (e.g., Moscati & Crain 2014), while others invoke pragmatic and/or processing factors (e.g., Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino & Lidz 2006). The present study investigates whether the isomorphism effect is specific to development or rather is observable in other populations with language processing limitations. We investigated the interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing “every” and negation in 4–6-year-old children, individuals with Broca’s aphasia, and neurotypical adult controls. We observed parallel performance in the children and the aphasic group, with both groups accessing more surface scope readings than inverse scope readings. This finding suggests that the preference for isomorphism may not be specific to acquisition and supports accounts that are not specifically based on learnability considerations—for example, processing accounts along the lines of Musolino & Lidz (2006).

Input Versus Output in the Acquisition of Negative Polarity: The Curious Case of Any

This paper draws on the simple observation that young children acquire the constraints on negative polarity items (NPIs) with relative ease and speed, and, against the backdrop of existing theoretical proposals about licensing, identifies a fundamental learning puzzle. We will begin with an overview of the methods that have been used to tap into normally-developing English-speaking children’s knowledge of NPI any; such methods have revealed evidence of adult-like knowledge of the licensing condition on any in children as young as 2–3 years of age. To address the question of how children get to this stage, I examine samples of caregiver input, and discuss how they reveal different kinds of evidence for any’s restricted distribution and its licensers. Importantly however, I argue that the caregiver input does not provide direct evidence of the underlying semantics of any. If only a subset of what must be acquired is present in the input, we are left with a puzzling learning problem about how children arrive at the target representation of NPIs such as any.