Revisiting the epistemic gap: It’s not the thought that counts

Cournane, Ailí­s

doi:10.1080/10489223.2020.1860054

Cited by 15 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…However, children never distinguished by sentence type. Three-year-olds had an overall deontic bias, consistent with early modal verb production patterns (see Papafragou 1998;Hickmann & Bassano 2016;Cournane 2021). By age 5, children had a strong epistemic bias for both sentence types, even though adults significantly preferred deontic interpretations for (2a).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 59%

“…Acquisition work on modal flavour has focused on the emergence and usage patterns for modal verbs in production, primarily on English modal auxiliary verbs (for overviews, Papafragou 1998;Hickmann & Bassano 2016;Cournane 2021). Foundational corpus work observed a priority and dominance of root uses (like ability, deontic, and teleological): by age 2 children use modal verbs with root meanings, but epistemic uses occur only from around age 3 (Kuczaj & Maratsos 1975;Stephany 1979;Wells 1979;i.a.).…”

Section: Modal Flavour In Spontaneous Child Productionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nonetheless, these child samples still show modal verbs first with root uses, both in aggregate and for particular modals in individuals (6). show a longer "epistemic gap" (Cournane 2015a;b;2021) than English? Earliest explanations appealed to a conceptual lag in epistemic reasoning relative to the reasoning involved for root modalities (Sweetser 1990;Papafragou 1998, i.a.).…”

Section: Modal Flavour In Spontaneous Child Productionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another proposal for the epistemic gap is that grammatical representations of epistemic modal verbs are more complex (=involve more structure) than for root modal verbs (Cournane 2015a;b;2021;see also Heizmann 2006;De Villiers 2007). Cournane (2015a,b) argues that the typical age 3 milestone for first epistemic uses of English modal verbs is linked to grammatical change in the developing child.…”

Section: Modal Flavour In Spontaneous Child Productionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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If they must, they will: Children overcommit to likeliness inferences from deontic modals

Cournane

Veselinović

2022

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Modal verbs like must express two distinct non-actual meanings: deontic (e.g., obligation) and epistemic (e.g., inference). How do young children understand these modals? What factors affect their interpretation as deontic or epistemic? We report a picture preference task testing preschool children’s interpretations of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) morati ‘must’ as deontic or epistemic. Prior work on English must shows that despite an early deontic comprehension bias at age 3, by age 5 children have flipped to a strong epistemic bias, including for constructions adults prefer deontic interpretations (must + eventive verbs). However, properties of English leave open multiple explanations for this non-adult behaviour, as must is primarily epistemic in the input, and must + eventive verb constructions can also receive epistemic interpretations. BCS morati provides a natural comparison: morati is overwhelmingly deontic in the input, and BCS syntax provides categorical cues to deontic versus epistemic interpretation. Our results show that BCS children are more adult-like at age 3 than English children, a difference we attribute to clearer syntactic cues to flavour in BCS. But, by age 5 BCS children behave like English counterparts, preferring epistemic interpretations even for constructions that are deontic-only in BCS. We argue this cross-linguistic result is best explained pragmatically: deontic uses of both morati and must invite a likelihood inference that obligations will be normatively carried out. This inference was first proposed to explain diachronic meaning changes from root-to-epistemic. We show older preschool children commit to this likelihood inference more than adults.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Section: Modal Flavour In Spontaneous Child Productionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modal Flavour In Spontaneous Child Productionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modal Flavour In Spontaneous Child Productionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

If they must, they will: Children overcommit to likeliness inferences from deontic modals

Cournane

Veselinović

2022

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Our data provide qualified support for hypothesis 2. Children produce modal language by age 3 (Cournane 2021, Van Dooren et al 2017. On the first hypothesis 3-year-olds should have modal concepts; hence they should solve our nonverbal task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Might and might not: Children's conceptual development and the acquisition of modal verbs

Leahy

Zalnieriunas

2022

SALT

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When a child acquires her first modal verbs, is she learning how to map words in the language she is learning onto innate concepts of possibility, necessity, and impossibility? Or does she also have to construct modal concepts? If the concepts are constructed, does learning to talk about possibilities play a role in the construction process? Exploring this hypothesis space requires testing children's acquisition of modal vocabulary alongside nonverbal tests of their modal concepts. Here we report a study with 103 children from 4;0 through 7;11 and 24 adults. We argue that the data fit best with the hypothesis that acquisition of modal language and development of modal concepts proceed hand-in-hand. However, more research is needed, especially with 3-year-olds.

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Finding the force: How children discern possibility and necessity modals

Dieuleveut

Dooren²,

Cournane³

et al. 2022

Nat Lang Semantics

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This paper investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals: that possibility modals (e.g., can/might) express possibility, and necessity modals (e.g., must/have to) express necessity. Modals raise a classic subset problem: given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from hypothesizing possibility meanings for necessity modals? Three solutions to such subset problems can be found in the literature: the first is for learners to rely on downward-entailing (DE) environments (Gualmini and Schwarz in J. Semant. 26(2):185-215, 2009); the second is a bias for strong (here, necessity) meanings; the third is for learners to rely on pragmatic cues stemming from the conversational context (Dieuleveut et al. in

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Revisiting the epistemic gap: It’s not the thought that counts

Cited by 15 publications

References 73 publications

If they must, they will: Children overcommit to likeliness inferences from deontic modals

If they must, they will: Children overcommit to likeliness inferences from deontic modals

Might and might not: Children's conceptual development and the acquisition of modal verbs

Finding the force: How children discern possibility and necessity modals

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