The Fleeting Isomorphism Effect

Conroy, Anastasia; Lidz, Jeffrey; Musolino, Julien

doi:10.1080/10489220902769242

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Gualmini (2005) demonstrated that, when experimental conditions were modified to make it more felicitous to use negation with the universal quantifier (by clearly setting up the focus of the test stories to be whether, for example, all of the horses could make it over the fence), English-speaking children aged 3 ; 0-5 ; 7 were able to access the inverse scope interpretation of sentences like ' Every horse didn't jump over the fence '. These results have been replicated by Conroy, Lidz and Musolino (2009) for English-speaking children aged 4 ; 5-5 ; 2, and Mandarin-speaking children have also been shown to access the inverse scope reading of similar sentences in Mandarin (Zhou & Crain, 2009). Given these more recent results on the isomorphism effect it is unlikely that the younger children in our study were simply incapable of accessing the inverse scope readings of our test sentences.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 71%

“…However, later work on the isomorphism effect raised the possibility that children assigned structural scope in earlier studies because they were unable to accommodate certain pragmatic infelicities in the stories they were presented with. These results have been replicated by Conroy, Lidz and Musolino (2009) for English-speaking children aged 4 ; 5-5 ; 2, and Mandarin-speaking children have also been shown to access the inverse scope reading of similar sentences in Mandarin (Zhou & Crain, 2009). These results have been replicated by Conroy, Lidz and Musolino (2009) for English-speaking children aged 4 ; 5-5 ; 2, and Mandarin-speaking children have also been shown to access the inverse scope reading of similar sentences in Mandarin (Zhou & Crain, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

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Children's interpretation of disjunction in the scope of ‘before’: a comparison of English and Mandarin

et al. 2011

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This study investigates three- to five-year-old children's interpretation of disjunction in sentences like 'The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or the bunny'. English disjunction has a conjunctive interpretation in such sentences ('The dog reached the finish line before the turtle and before the bunny'). This interpretation conforms with classical logic. Mandarin disjunction ('huozhe') can take scope over 'before' ('zai … zhiqian'), so the same sentence can mean 'The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or before the bunny (I don't know which)'. If children are guided by adult input in the acquisition of sentence meanings, English- and Mandarin-speaking children should assign different interpretations to such sentences. If children are guided by logical principles, then children acquiring either language should initially assign the conjunctive interpretation of disjunction. A truth-value judgment task was used to test this prediction and English- and Mandarin-speaking children were found to behave similarly.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 71%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Children's interpretation of disjunction in the scope of ‘before’: a comparison of English and Mandarin

et al. 2011

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“…Every third trial corresponded to a dynamic control, for which the experimenter could select either the yes - or the no -target. This precaution allowed us to ensure that participants could give both yes - and no -responses where appropriate, and allowed us to avoid overly long sequences of successive yes - and no -targets, which otherwise might encourage a yes - or no -bias, respectively (for previous examples of the use of such dynamic fillers, see Musolino and Lidz, 2006; Conroy et al, 2009; Tieu and Lidz, 2016; Lewis et al, 2017). Any participant who failed to correctly answer at least six of the eight definite plural controls was excluded from analysis.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's Acquisition of Homogeneity in Plural Definite Descriptions

2019

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Plural definite descriptions give rise to homogeneity effects: the positive The trucks are blue and the negative The trucks aren't blue are both neither true nor false when some of the trucks are blue and some are not, that is, when the group of trucks is not homogeneous with respect to the property of being blue (Löbner, 1987, 2000; Schwarzschild, 1994; Križ, 2015b). The only existing acquisition studies related to the phenomenon have examined children's comprehension only of the affirmative versions of such sentences, and moreover have yielded conflicting data; while one study reports that preschoolers interpret definite plurals maximally (Munn et al., 2006, see also Royle et al., 2018), two other studies report that preschoolers allow non-maximal interpretations of definite plurals where adults do not (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Caponigro et al., 2012). Moreover, there is no agreed upon developmental trajectory to adult homogeneity. In this paper, we turn to acquisition data to investigate the predictions of a recent analysis of homogeneity that treats homogeneous meanings as the result of a scalar implicature (Magri, 2014). We conducted two experiments targeting 4- and 5-year-old French-speaking children's interpretations of plural definite descriptions in positive and negative sentences, and tested the same children on standard cases of scalar implicature. The experiments revealed three distinct subgroups of children: those who interpreted the plural definite descriptions existentially and failed to compute implicatures; those who both accessed homogeneous interpretations and computed implicatures; and finally, a smaller subgroup of children who appeared to access homogeneous interpretations without computing implicatures. We discuss the implications of our findings, which appear to speak against the implicature theory as the adult-like means of generating homogeneous meanings.

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“…For instance, developmental enquiries show that children under a certain age mostly access surface scope interpretations for a variety of configurations and only later the whole set of their corresponding reverse scope interpretations. This suggests that scope reversal is indeed a single piece in the system, an operation, either to be acquired or plainly acquired (see, e.g., Conroy, Lidz & Musolino 2009 for more detailed discussion).…”

Section: Linguistic Operations and Primingmentioning

confidence: 99%