Abstract
This paper focuses on children’s interpretation of sentences containing negation and a quantifier (e.g., The detective didn’t find some guys). Recent studies suggest that, although children are capable of accessing inverse scope interpretations of such sentences, they resort to surface scope to a larger extent than adults. To account for children’s behavioral pattern, we propose a new factor at play in Truth Value Judgment tasks: the Question–Answer Requirement (QAR). According to the QAR, children (and adults) must interpret the target sentence that they evaluate as an answer to a question that is made salient by the discourse.
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Among many others, we would like to thank Stephen Crain, Ivano Caponigro, Aniko Csirmaz, Irene Heim, Luisa Meroni, Julien Musolino, Andrew Nevins, Carson Schütze, Bernhard Schwarz, and Ken Wexler, as well as the participants in seminar 24.979 at MIT in the fall of 2003, as well as two anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to the teachers, parents, and children at Open Center for Children and Bright Future (Somerville, MA), Bright Horizons Old West Church (Boston, MA), the Volpe Center, Bright Horizons One Kendall Square and Technology Children’s Center (Cambridge, MA), Center for Young Children (College Park, MD), Jardin D’Enfants NDG, Playskool and YMCA Westmount daycare (Montréal, QC). Andrea Gualmini’s research was partially supported by a McGill VP-Research internal grant, a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and by a VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and Utrecht University.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Gualmini, A., Hulsey, S., Hacquard, V. et al. The Question–Answer Requirement for scope assignment. Nat Lang Semantics 16, 205–237 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9029-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9029-z
Keywords
- Language acquisition
- Negation
- Scope ambiguities
- Ambiguity resolution