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Related Experiment Videos

Children's command of quantification.

Jeffrey Lidz1, Julien Musolino

  • 1Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, 2016 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL 60208-4090, USA.

Cognition
|August 15, 2002
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Children interpret ambiguous sentences differently than adults, preferring meanings based on surface structure. This reveals insights into children's developing grammatical knowledge and syntactic representations.

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').

Related Experiment Videos

  • 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.