Quantifying kids prefer intersecting sets – a pilot study

• Main Authors: Haider Hubert, Schörghofer-Essl Christina, Seethaler Karin
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: De Gruyter 2017-06-01
• Series: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
• Subjects: acquisition of semantics; quantifier spreading; exhaustive pairing
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2017-0003

Children between approximately four and five years of age are known to fail in picture matching tasks with verbal stimuli presenting an existentially quantified object NP in the scope of a universally quantified subject NP. In this paper, we suggest an experimentally tested provisional answer to a question that has not been asked in any previous work on the very phenomenon: Would they also fail for the truth-conditionally equivalent stimuli in which the universal quantifier is replaced by a negated existential quantifier (plus a negated predicate, as in Every boy walks with a balloon vs. No boy walks without a balloon).