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This squib investigates the nature of the phenomenon of isomorphism, which expresses the observation that young children, unlike adults, display a strong preference for the interpretation of sentences containing negation and quantified noun phrase (NPs) that corresponds to the surface syntactic position of these scope-taking operators. The authors focus on sentences containing negation and indefinite objects. Based on the intuition that indefinites can give rise to what has been called either a presuppositional/quantificational or a cardinal interpretation, they propose that isomorphism, as it pertains to indefinite objects, arises when children fail to select the so-called presuppositional interpretation of the NP and its associated logical representation. This account predicts that when plain NPs like some Ns and two Ns are replaced by inherently presuppositional ones, such as partitives, children should be more likely to access the nonisomorphic, wide-scope interpretation of the indefinite objects with respect to negation. This prediction is tested and verified in two experiments designed to assess young children's interpretation of sentences containing negation and partitive NPs in object position.

Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to all) in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical entries with some. Such is the case with some in English and unos and algunos in Spanish. Indeed, Heritage Spanish-English bilinguals have been documented as diverging from monolingual children and adults in their interpretation of algunos, which is said to lexically encode this upper-bounded meaning, although early Heritage bilinguals do not demonstrate this knowledge robustly. In this article, we ask how pervasive this challenge is by (a) investigating whether the same pattern holds in English, where there are not two words for some, and (b) comparing the pragmatic process for some to other linguistic items that either invoke another pragmatic process (particularized conversational implicature) or a semantic upper bound. Our results strongly suggest that the extended process of fine-tuning of quantificational lexical entries within and across languages precedes a pragmatic comparison of alternatives, but at the same time, Heritage bilinguals demonstrate pragmatic awareness beyond generalized conversational implicatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this brief article is to investigate four-year-olds' interpretation of attributive measure phrases (MPs), such as3-pound, and the role of cardinality in mediating children's responses. In two experiments, I demonstrate that children at this age are starting to recognize that such MPs refer to a property of an individual, such as weight per unit (rather than the weight of an entire collection). Accordingly, they distinguish between attributive and pseudopartitive MPs. However, when the opportunity presents itself to treat the number word as referring to the cardinality of a set, some children succumb to this pressure, deviating from adult-like responses. I argue that the fundamental aspect of number word meaning that children take the first few years of life to master—that number words denote exact cardinality of a set of discrete objects—is precisely the aspect they must overcome when interpreting these MPs. However, the evidence shows that four-year-olds are well on their way to doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children, it is very low in Spanish-speaking children. We argue that this difference can be attributed to a property of their respective grammars (the presence or otherwise of past participle agreement when objects cliticize) under the Unique Checking Constraint of Wexler (1998). In a second experiment, we confirm the robustness of early sensitivity to past participle agreement; through a grammaticality judgment task we find a statistically significant difference between the two languages. We show that the parametric approach postulated can be extended, for mandatory, overt objects, beyond Catalan and Spanish, broadening the empirical scope of the Unique Checking Constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study of a between-subjects design experiment on the comprehension of telicity in simple telic predicates (e.g., John filled the bucket) and locatum predicates (e.g., the water filled the bucket) in L1 Spanish. Weist, Wysocka, and Lyytinen (1991) for English and Finnish, and Van Hout (1997, 1998b) for English and Dutch have shown that children up to age 6;06 allow simple telic predicates to have both telic and atelic interpretations. The main objective of this article is to show that children aged 3;09 allow locatum structures to be interpreted as telic, like adults, but allow simple telic predicates to have telic and atelic interpretations. The central claim is that in simple telic predicates, telicity is checked by covert movement, while in locatum predicates, telicity is checked by overt movement. Children misinterpret simple telic predicates because covert movement is an operation that takes place after the branching off to the PF component, but perform like adults when overt movement is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by adult models of language production and comprehension, we investigate whether children's nonadult interpretation of ambiguous negative quantified sentences reflects their sensitivity to distributional patterns of language use. Studies 1 and 2 show that ambiguous negative quantified sentences of the sort typically used in acquisition studies are strongly avoided in adult production and are judged as poor alternatives by adults. Corpus Studies 3 and 4 show that children and adults overwhelmingly use quantifiers and negation in ways that promote one interpretation of these ambiguous quantified sentences over others. We argue that these patterns guide children's ambiguity resolution processes and explain children's interpretations of ambiguous quantified sentences. The origin of distributional patterns in adult production processes is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the correspondence conditions that hold between certain semantic relations—including part-whole relations, possession, location, and the semantic features [± animate] or [± count]—and certain syntactic structures including genitives and relative clauses. The objective is to determine the extent to which these correspondence conditions derive from Universal Grammar or are "learned" by children in response to input from caretakers and others. Interface conditions imposed by Universal Grammar (UG) are expected to appear early in the course of language development despite the vagaries of the primary linguistic data. In this article, we show that children as young as 3 years old adhere to specific semantic distinctions and to specific constraints on the mapping of these distinctions onto syntactic structures. Moreover, the children show more stringent adherence to interface conditions than adult speakers of the same languages do, indicating that children's mapping relations between syntax and semantics are not based on their experience but rather are projected from UG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Number acquisition is a field of research with a wealth of studies mainly by psychologists. In this article, I try to add some linguistic insights. To acquire all number words with their meanings as a basis for further mathematical thinking-at least other numerals than those for small numerosities like [two] or [three] (and maybe [four])-a child has to learn a number sequence as a list of speech forms meaningless at first. It is claimed that general principles of rhythm and coordination explain the child's ability to learn by rote a sequence of such speech forms and their word class. I show that these principles also apply in the acquisition of sequences of the names of the days of the week and the names of the months. As far as the development of the counting abilities for numbers up to [a hundred] is concerned, I argue that the particular rhythmical structure of the sequence provides the child with the raw material to develop a concept "decade word." The child will have to learn by rote a second sequence, that is, the sequence of the decade numbers [10, 20, 30, etc.]. This is an important step in the detection of the algorithm that ultimately makes the generation of all natural numbers possible. I argue that the theory of reduction from Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1996) generative theory of music may explain this step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]