Children's command of quantification

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Understanding how children acquire complex grammatical structures is crucial for developmental linguistics.
• Scopally ambiguous sentences, particularly those involving quantification and negation, present significant challenges for language acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how children and adults interpret scopally ambiguous sentences.
• To explore the role of hierarchical structure and c-command in children's linguistic representations.
• To identify language-independent differences in ambiguity resolution between child and adult speakers.

Main Methods:

• Experiments with child and adult speakers of English and Kannada.
• Analysis of interpretations of sentences with numeral quantifiers and negation (e.g., 'Donald didn't find two guys').
• Focus on identifying systematic differences in scope interpretation.

Main Results:

• Adults can access both scope interpretations, while 4-year-old children show a preference for interpretations aligned with surface syntactic position.
• Children's interpretations are constrained by hierarchical relations (c-command), not linear order.
• Systematic differences in ambiguity resolution were observed, independent of the language spoken.

Conclusions:

• Children's non-adult interpretations provide evidence for their underlying syntactic representations.
• Children's language processing is guided by hierarchical structure, specifically c-command relations.
• This study sheds light on the development of abstract grammatical knowledge in children.