Quantifier spreading in child eye movements: A case of the Russian quantifier <i>kazhdyj</i> ‘every'

Abstract

Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9-10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children's difficulties in restricting the domain of a universal quantifier to the appropriate noun phrase and are referred in the literature as quantifier-spreading (q-spreading). We adapted the task to be performed in conjunction with eye-movement recordings using the Visual World Paradigm. Russian-speaking 5-to-6-year-old children (N = 31) listened to sentences like Kazhdyj alligator lezhit v vanne 'Every alligator is lying in a bathtub' and viewed pictures with three alligators, each in a bathtub, and two extra empty bathtubs. Non-spreader children (N = 12) were adult-like in their accuracy whereas q-spreading ones (N = 19) were only 43% correct in interpreting such sentences compared to the control sentences. Eye movements of q-spreading children revealed that more looks to the extra containers (two empty bathtubs) correlated with higher error rates reflecting the processing pattern of q-spreading. In contrast, more looks to the distractors in control sentences did not lead to errors in interpretation. We argue that q-spreading errors are caused by interference from the extra entities in the visual context, and our results support the processing difficulty account of acquisition of quantification. Interference results in cognitive overload as children have to integrate multiple sources of information, i.e., visual context with salient extra entities and the spoken sentence in which these entities are mentioned in real-time processing.

Understanding heritage languages

“…Suppose there are three girls and four elephants and each of the three girls is riding a different elephant; one of the elephants does not have a girl riding on it, but this fact is irrelevant to the true claim that every girl is riding an elephant . However, children, L2 learners, and heritage speakers will sometimes reject the claim and give as their justification the elephant without a girl on its back; baseline adults accept the claim (see Brooks & Braine, 1996; Crain, Thornton, Boster, Conway, Lillo-Martin & Woodams, 1996; Sekerina & Sauermann, 2017, for child learners; Carpini, 2003; Berent, Kelly & Schueler-Choukairi, 2009, for adult L2 learners, and Sekerina & Sauermann, 2015, for English-dominant heritage speakers of Russian). While in children it might be the case that knowledge of quantification is still developing in tandem with executive function (i.e., the ability to correctly attend to relevant elements of the task), in adults – both L2 learners and heritage speakers – this explanation appears untenable.…”

Comprehension and processing of the universal quantifier in children, adolescents and adults

“…Sekerina and Sauermann (2017) also report increased looks to the extra object accompanying children's Q-spreading errors.…”

Quantifier spreading and the question under discussion

“…In related work, Donaldson and Lloyd (1974) found that 4year-old children treated the sentence, "All the cars are in the garages" as entailing that "All the garages have cars in them" indicating a symmetry requirement (see also Donaldson & McGarrigle, 1974, for a more widely available report of this phenomenon). Since these early studies, many additional studies have investigated this phenomenon, positing a range of semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic explanations, many as recent as the past 2-3 years (for very recent ideas, see Brunetti et al, 2021;Chen, Rosenstein & Hackl, 2020;Denić & Chemla, 2020;Drozd et al, 2019;Ke & Gao, 2020;Kiss, & Zétényi, 2017;Sekerina, & Sauermann, 2017; see Brooks & Parshina, 2019 for review). In the present study, we present evidence in favor of a form of pragmatic account, and show that children's apparent errors arise when experimenters fail to adequately specify a clear "Question Under Discussion" (henceforth QUD; Roberts, 1996Roberts, /2012.…”