Acquisition of epistemic and deontic meaning of modals

Hirst, William; Weil, Joyce

doi:10.1017/s0305000900004967

Cited by 80 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 4 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…may vs. should) or mental verbs (e.g. know vs. think) in English by the age of four (Hirst & Weil, 1982;Moore, Bryant, & Furrow, 1989;Moore & Furrow, 1991;Papafragou, 1998 Still, it is possible that the present findings underestimate what Korean children know about linguistic evidentials. Specifically, the first of our linguistic tasks requires children to reason explicitly about the meaning of the morphemes -e and -tay in order to infer who might have produced an utterance containing them.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Evidentiality in language and cognition

et al. 2007

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What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3-and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable ☆ We wish to thank Lila Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Eleni Miltsakaki, and the other members of the CHEESE seminar at the University of Pennsylvania for discussion of this project. Thanks also to Seungyun Yang for experimental help. This research was partly supported by NIH/NRSA Grants #F32MH065020 to Anna Papafragou and #1F32HD043532 to Peggy Li and by SSHRC Grant #410-2003-0544 to Chung-hye Han. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: papafragou@psych.udel.edu ,pegs@wjh.harvard.edu, youngonc@sas.upenn.edu, chunghye@sfu.ca. 15 Again, the basic results do not change regardless of the which linguistic score was compared with which non-linguistic score. There is always an effect of Task (Non-linguistic better than Linguistic), and always an effect of Task × Age (with a larger Age effect for Nonlinguistic than Linguistic tasks). 24 Such mapping problems have been originally pointed out and discussed in the context of learning procedures for mental verbs (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Gleitman, 1990;Papafragou, Cassidy, Gleitman, & Hulbert, 2004;Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). As these authors point out, observational cues to the meaning of mental verbs such as think or believe are few and impoverished compared to those for action verbs such as catch or eat. On at least some occas...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Evidentiality in language and cognition

et al. 2007

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“…The majority of the children failed to reject a statement such as ''The cow may be in the pink box" when the statement was weaker than the available evidence (e.g., when the cow had to be in the pink box). However, when given a choice between may and has to versions of the same statement in the same context, children overwhelmingly chose the modal that was most appropriate based on the evidence available to the speaker (see also Chierchia et al, 2001;Hirst & Weil, 1982). In line with this evidence, the methodological account -but not the psycholinguistic account -predicts that Turkish learners' evidential comprehension should improve in the contrastive task of Experiment 3 compared to Experiment 2.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Production–comprehension asymmetries and the acquisition of evidential morphology

Ünal

Papafragou

2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…3 Third, the idea that a listener would reject a strong interpretation when it is provided seems unlikely. Many have shown (Hirst & Weil 1982;Moore et al 1990;Noveck et al 1995, Chierchia et al 2004) that children, at least, prefer stronger utterances over weak ones in the absence or presence of validating context. For example, Noveck et al (1995) showed how five-year-olds prefer to follow the advice of the speaker who uses has to over another who uses might when there is no way to determine which is correct (compare The peanut has to be under the cup versus the peanut might be under the box) and Chierchia and colleagues have shown that four-year-olds prefer stronger descriptions over weak ones when both options are valid (for example they choose all over some to describe a scenario that would best be described with all).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Autism Can Reveal About Every ... not Sentences

Noveck

Guelminger

Guillaume

et al. 2006

Journal of Semantics

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The sentence Every horse did not jump over the fence can be interpreted with the negation taking scope over the quantifier (i.e. not every horse jumped) or with the quantifier Every taking scope over the negation (ultimately providing the reading no horse jumped). Beginning with Musolino, Crain and Thornton (2000), much work has shown that while adults typically adopt a Not every reading in '2-of-3' contexts (e.g. where 2-of-3 horses jump over a fence), children do not and often produce None readings instead. In line with suggestions from Lidz (2003, 2006), we propose that this developmental effect relies to a great extent on pragmatic capacities. In the present work, we aim to replicate Musolino et al.'s (2000) results with 4-year-olds and adults while including verbally competent autistic participants. Syntactic skills among verbally competent autistic participants are assumed to be unimpaired while their pragmatic deficiencies have been well documented. Our results show an adult preference for the Not every reading in 2-of-3 contexts and equivocality among children and autistic participants. This is in line with the expectation that syntax makes the two readings equally available and that adults, unlike young children and autistic participants, are efficient at exploiting the context in order to come up with a single consistent reading.

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Acquisition of epistemic and deontic meaning of modals

Cited by 80 publications

References 4 publications

Evidentiality in language and cognition

Evidentiality in language and cognition

Production–comprehension asymmetries and the acquisition of evidential morphology

What Autism Can Reveal About Every ... not Sentences

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