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 languageand learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.language acquisition | universals | quantifiers | semantics | pragmatics N umber words and quantifiers are abstract words that denote properties of sets rather than individuals. Twoness and allness in "two/all of the black cats in the street" are not true of any individual cat, whereas blackness and catness are. Children display knowledge of number words and quantifiers around their second birthday, comparatively long after they have acquired concrete nouns (1, 2). As far as number words are concerned, a range of cognitive and perceptual systems supports their acquisition.These systems include an object-tracking system, which enables the precise representation of small quantities, and an analog magnitude system, which enables imprecise and approximate comparisons (1), SignificanceAlthough 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.

The current study investigates preschool-age children's comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g., Hayashibe in Descr Appl Linguist 8:1-18, 1975; Sano in Descr Appl Linguist 10:213-233, 1977; Suzuki in Jpn J Educ Psychol 25(3):56-61, 1977), children are able to interpret scrambled sentences in an adult-like way when the pragmatics is enriched in the experiments (Otsu in Acquisition studies in generative grammar, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 253-264, 1994). These findings suggest that children's difficulty in comprehending scrambling may be due to processing difficulties (Suzuki in J Psycholinguist Res 42(2), 119-137, 2013), such as the Lexical-ordering Strategy bias (Bever in Cognition and language development, Wiley, New York, pp 279-352, 1970), rather than their lack of the linguistic knowledge of scrambling. The current study revealed that children are indeed able to utilize prosodic information to interpret scrambled sentences in an adult-like way. Our findings provide converging evidence in favor of the proposal that children's grammatical knowledge of scrambling is intact, although they are more vulnerable than adults to processing difficulties that hinder their ability to successfully interpret scrambled sentences.

Japanese is known to have verbal compounds consisting of two verbs (hereafter “V-V compounds”), and many theoretical studies have shown that V-V compounds can be divided into two types: lexical and syntactic V-V compounds (Kageyama 1993, among many others). A recent study by Kageyama (2013, 2016a, 2016b) points out that the lexical V-V compounds can be further categorized into two types, one of which can be paraphrased as the V-te V sequence. The aim of our current study is to elucidate based on experimental data whether Japanese-speaking children aged 4-5 can correctly comprehend lexical V-V compounds and differentiate them from the V-te V sequence which are superficially similar to but syntactically distinct from them. Our experiment reveals that children can differentiate between the syntactic properties of these constructions and thus have acquired the two different constructions consisting of two-verb sequences by the time they turn 4 years old.

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