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Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for "all," "none," "some," "some not," and "most" in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that languageand learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.

While languages may vary widely as regards which concepts they encode, learners of most (if not all) languages will be faced with the task of acquiring a basic vocabulary to talk about universal aspects of human experience, such as space, time and quantity. In this paper we focus on quantifying words like ‘all’, ‘none’ and ‘some’ whose meaning and use exhibit cross-linguistic similarities as well as differences. We report an investigation in the acquisition of quantifiers by 592 5-year-old children and 440 adults speaking one of 24 languages. The findings reveal four semantic and pragmatic factors that lead to robust patterns of similarity across languages, as well as lexical factors that lead to language- specific differences. We explore the implications about the interplay of language- wide and language-specific features in the process of acquisition, as well as the relation between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition.

Does the development of conceptual categories depend on syntactic and lexical features of a language? As part of a larger project we studied the comprehension of the (cross-linguistic equivalent of the English) quantifiers ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘some’, ‘some…not’, and ‘most’, by 5-year-old children (n=606) and adult controls (n=441) speaking one of 24 languages, representing eleven Genera. The languages differ in terms of Concord, Lexical class (e.g. noun ‘la mayoría’ vs quantifier ‘most’), use of Partitive (‘of the’), the number of Syllables, and Quantifier-Noun Order, among others. The findings suggest a fundamentally uniform pattern of the acquisition of conceptual categories across languages, which is modulated by specific syntactic and lexical features. We discuss whether the similarities in acquisition are underlined by universal conceptual primitives.