Navigating negative quantificational space

Musolino, Julien; Crain, Stephen; Thornton, Rosalind

doi:10.1515/ling.38.1.1

Cited by 113 publications

(128 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…To our knowledge, only one study, by Musolino, Crain, and Thornton (2000), presents a systematic investigation of children's comprehension of quantifier-negation interactions. This study therefore constitutes a natural starting point for our investigation.…”

Section: Psycholinguistic Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This study therefore constitutes a natural starting point for our investigation. Musolino et al (2000) begin with the observation that sentences containing quantifiers and negation often permit readings which do not directly follow from an isomorphic mapping of surface form to semantic interpretation (see discussion in Section 2 and also Büring, 1997;Horn, 1989;Jackendoff, 1972 among others). Consider the examples below.…”

Section: Psycholinguistic Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Whereas (16) is scopally ambiguous, (17) seems to require a non-isomorphic interpretation expressing the idea that there are some guys that the detective didn't find. In order to determine whether preschool children are aware of the complex mappings between form and meaning involved in sentences like (16) and (17), Musolino et al (2000) tested children's comprehension of such sentences using the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) methodology (Crain & Thornton, 1998). The main finding from Musolino et al's study is that while adults can easily access the non-isomorphic interpretations of sentences like (16) and (17), 4-year-olds systematically assign such sentences an isomorphic interpretation only.…”

Section: Psycholinguistic Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Testing young children's interpretation of sentences like (22) provides a clear proving ground for the observation of isomorphism by addressing the lexical question. This experiment will determine whether or not the observation of isomorphism is restricted to the kinds of quantified NPs tested by Musolino et al (2000).…”

Section: Experiments On Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We chose 4-year-olds because previous studies (i.e. Musolino et al, 2000) showed that it is at that age that children give non-adult responses to ambiguous sentences containing quantified NPs and negation. It is also important to note that choosing the TVJT as our experimental methodology imposed limits on the age of our child subjects since the task usually proves to be too complex for children under the age of 4.…”

Section: Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Children's command of quantification

2002

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In this article we present data from two sets of experiments designed to investigate how children and adult speakers of English and Kannada (Dravidian) interpret scopally ambiguous sentences containing numerally quantified noun phrases and negation (e.g. Donald didn't find two guys). We use this kind of sentence as a way to find evidence in children's linguistic representations for the hierarchical structure and the abstract relations defined over these structures (in particular, the relation of c-command) that linguists take to be at the core of grammatical knowledge. Specifically, we uncover the existence of systematic differences in the way that children and adult speakers resolve these ambiguities, independent of the language they speak. That is, while adults can easily access either scope interpretation, 4-year-old children display a strong preference for the scopal interpretation of the quantified elements which corresponds to their surface syntactic position. Crucially, however, we show that children's interpretations are constrained by the surface hierarchical relations (i.e. the c-command relations) between these elements and not by their linear order. Children's non-adult interpretations are therefore informative about the nature of the syntactic representations they entertain and the rules they use to determine the meaning of a sentence from its structure. q

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Section: Psycholinguistic Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Psycholinguistic Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Psycholinguistic Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments On Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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