Quantification in Child Language

Lidz, Jeffrey

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601264.013.21

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 76 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…In more subtle cases of true or fake scope ambiguity, there are concerns that children may undershoot or overshoot what the target grammar allows. In cases of true scope ambiguity children typically show strong biases for one interpretation, generally the same interpretation that adults favor (Lidz & Musolino, 2002), though not always (Goro & Akiba, 2004;Unsworth et al, 2008), though these biases can be overcome with strong contextual support (Gualmini, 2008;Lidz, 2014;Viau et al, 2010). More worryingly, we find cases where children allow scope interpretations that are disallowed in the adult language (Goro, 2007).…”

Section: Analysis and Reanalysis In Childrenmentioning

confidence: 66%

The role of language processing in language acquisition

Phillips

Ehrenhofer

2015

LAB

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Language processing research is changing in two ways that should make it more relevant to the study of grammatical learning. First, grammatical phenomena are re-entering the psycholinguistic fray, and we have learned a lot in recent years about the real-time deployment of grammatical knowledge. Second, psycholinguistics is reaching more diverse populations, leading to much research on language processing in child and adult learners. We discuss three ways that language processing can be used to understand language acquisition. Level 1 approaches (“Processing in learners”) explore well-known phenomena from the adult psycholinguistic literature and document how they play out in learner populations (child learners, adult learners, bilinguals). Level 2 approaches (“Learning effects as processing effects”) use insights from adult psycholinguistics to understand the language proficiency of learners. We argue that a rich body of findings that have been attributed to the grammatical development of anaphora should instead be attributed to limitations in the learner’s language processing system. Level 3 approaches (“Explaining learning via processing”) use language processing to understand what it takes to successfully master the grammar of a language, and why different learner groups are more or less successful. We examine whether language processing may explain why some grammatical phenomena are mastered late in children but not in adult learners. We discuss the idea that children’s language learning prowess is directly caused by their processing limitations (‘less is more’: Newport, 1990). We conclude that the idea is unlikely to be correct in its original form, but that a variant of the idea has some promise (‘less is eventually more’). We lay out key research questions that need to be addressed in order to resolve the issues addressed in the paper.

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Section: Analysis and Reanalysis In Childrenmentioning

confidence: 66%

The role of language processing in language acquisition

Phillips

Ehrenhofer

2015

LAB

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“…Many languages express quantification with a variety of specific (e.g., 1, 2, 3), approximate (e.g., several ), universal (e.g., every ), and comparative (e.g., more ) terms (Lidz, 2016). An understanding of this core vocabulary, as well as a command of technical terms (e.g., hypotenuse ) and specialized uses of common words (e.g., regroup, simplify, significance ), is important for representing and conveying mathematical knowledge (Schleppegrell, 2007).…”

Section: Language and Mathematical Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of language instruction on math development

Espinas

Fuchs

2022

Child Dev Perspectives

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“…While this works with ambiguous sentences such as 2, which are susceptible to a scope analysis, the non-ambiguity of the sentence in 1 renders such an analysis less informative. 2 That is, a noun phrase 2 For a review of work on the development of children's scopal interpretations, including Musolino's (1998) Observation of Isomorphism, see Lidz (2016).…”

Section: Syntactic Scope and Semantic Ontologymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Collective-Distributive Pragmatic Scale and the Developing Lexicon

Grinstead

Padilla-Reyes

Nieves-Rivera

2021

Language Learning and Development

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A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as the in English, or los in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite direct object, modified by a in English, or una in Spanish, are ambiguous as to whether they are distributive or collective, all things being equal. In contrast, the same sentences with each/cada in subject position are unambiguously distributive. This account claims that sentences with quantifiers such as the/los in subject position come to be interpreted collectively, and not distributively, because the distributive meaning could more informatively be constructed using the unambiguous each/cada quantifier. This is the same neo-Gricean reasoning that accounts for the Quantity Implicature that arises for some, given the informativeness of all. On this account, collective and distributive interpretations are intrinsically linked, which predicts that even children's non-adult-like collective and distributive interpretations should nonetheless be statistically associated, which we confirm in a sample of Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children. We further propose that growth occurs both internal to lexical items, in terms of denotative content, as well as externally, within the lexicon in quantifier networks. Such networks have traditionally been expressed in formal semantics as pragmatic scales. We claim that the growth of both of these lexical dimensions are indexed by general lexical growth and show that a statistical association obtains between them in our sample.

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Quantification in Child Language

Cited by 4 publications

References 76 publications

The role of language processing in language acquisition

The role of language processing in language acquisition

The effects of language instruction on math development

A Collective-Distributive Pragmatic Scale and the Developing Lexicon

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