What hinders child semantic computation: children's universal quantification and the development of cognitive control

Abstract

Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such non-adult-like interpretations. The present study investigates Japanese four- and five-year-old children's atypical universal quantification in light of the development of cognitive control. We hypothesized that children's still-developing cognitive control contributes to their atypical universal quantification. Using a combined eye-tracking and interpretation task together with a non-linguistic measure of cognitive control, we revealed a link between the achievement of adult-like universal quantification and the development of flexible perspective-switch. We argue that the development of cognitive control is one of the factors that contribute to children's processing of semantics.

Acquisition and Use of Linguistic Knowledge: Scrambling in Child Japanese as a Test Case

“…We argue that children acquire linguistic knowledge of scrambling by around age 4, but that there may be some developmental factors that hinder children's successful use of this knowledge. Our findings not only fit very well with a recent trend in child language research that points to extra-linguistic factors blocking children's use of already-acquired linguistic knowledge (e.g., Mazuka et al 2009;Minai et al 2012), they also underscore the importance of teasing apart first language acquisition in terms of the possession of linguistic knowledge and child language processing in terms of the utilization of linguistic knowledge in the actual computation of linguistic meaning. In addition, the current study elucidates another specific domain in which phonology/prosody interacts with syntax in child language; children are able to incorporate prosodic information into their interpretation, in order to improve their comprehension of syntactically complex sentences.…”

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

“…", they point at the solo bicycle, and say something like "Not that bicycle", i.e., they show 'Exhaustive Pairing' under an extra object condition. This phenomenon has been attested in dozens of experiments among speakers of English (Bucci 1978;Philip 1995;Brooks & Braine 1996;Crain et al 1996;Roeper et al 2011), Dutch (Philip & Coopmans 1995;Drozd & van Loosbroek 1999;Hollebrandse 2004;Hollebrandse & Smits 2005;Philip 2011), Turkish (Freeman & Stedmon 1986), Russian (Sekerina & Sauermann 2015), Hungarian (Gyuris 1996), Korean (Kang 1999), Japanese (O'Grady et al 2010;Minai et al 2012), Norwegian, Spanish, and French (Philip 2011), etc. It has been found to be most common among preschoolers, but it has also been attested among older children (Philip 2011), as well as English adults and adult speakers of heritage Russian (Brooks & Sekerina 2005Sekerina & Sauermann 2015).…”

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

“…The fact that the act-out task may mask q-spreading emphasizes the necessity to investigate the role that visual context (i.e., pictures) plays in a novel way. Minai and colleagues (Minai et al 2012) did just that by employing the Visual World Paradigm (VWP;Trueswell & Tanenhaus 2004) to study what eye movements of Japanese-speaking children tell us of how they process quantified sentences in the presence of a visual context with partial one-to-one correspondence between two entities. They argue that the relative salience of extra objects in the pictures imposes perceptual restrictions on the domain of application of quantifiers, and children's attention is attracted to them ultimately leading to q-spreading errors.…”

“…There are two important issues that weaken the conclusions of Minai et al (2012). First, they employed the between-participants design (control vs. target group) and then divided 29 children in the control group into 5 who made a few q-spreading errors (0.75 accuracy) and 24 who made many q-spreading errors (0.02 accuracy) (Table 2: 933).…”

“…The current study strives to overcome the shortcomings of Minai et al (2012) by contrasting eye movements of Russian-speaking adults and 5-to-6-year-old children who are adult-like, i.e., non-spreaders (N = 12), and who are not, i.e., q-spreading children (N = 19). We employed the standard sentence-picture verification task coupled with the VWP and paired the same spoken quantified sentence with two types of pictures: a control picture (alligators and bathtubs in exact one-to-one correspondence plus two distractor elephants: Figure 1A) or an experimental picture (alligators and bathtubs in partial oneto-one correspondence with two extra empty bathtubs: Figure 1B).…”