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THE UPS and DOWNS of CHILD LANGUAGE: Experimental Studies

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THE UPS and DOWNS of CHILD LANGUAGE: Experimental Studies THE UPS AND DOWNS OF CHILD LANGUAGE: Experimental Studies on Children’s Knowledge of Entailment Relations and Polarity Phenomena By Andrea Gualmini Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2003 Advisory Committee: Professor Stephen Crain, Chair/Advisor Professor Norbert Hornstein Professor Paul M. Pietroski Professor Rosalind Thornton Professor John F. Horty, Dean’s Representative © Copyright by Andrea Gualmini 2003 ABSTRACT Title of the Dissertation: The Ups and Downs of Child Language Andrea Gualmini, Doctor of Philosophy, 2003 Dissertation directed by: Stephen Crain, Professor Department of Linguistics Downward Entailment is a semantic property common to many linguistic expressions across natural languages (Ladusaw, 1979). This dissertation takes downward entailment as a yardstick in assessing children’s semantic competence. First, downward entailment is used as a case study for several alternative models of language acquisition, including those recently proposed by Tomasello (2000) and by Pullum and Scholz (2002). According to these researchers, children are initially conservative, and tend to (re)produce linguistic expressions that they have experienced in the input. Even at later stages, when children form generalizations, children’s linguistic generalizations are directly tied to the input, i based on domain general learning mechanisms. These models are contrasted with one based on the principles and parameters of Universal Grammar. In an experimental study using the Truth Value Judgment task (Crain and Thornton, 1998), these alternative models are put to a test by investigating a phenomenon that displays a mismatch between the data available to the child and the semantic competence the child acquires, namely the interaction between downward entailment and c-command. In particular, we report the results of an experiment investigating children’s interpretation of the disjunction operator or in sentences in which that operator is c-commanded by negation, such as Winnie the Pooh will not let Eeyore eat the cookie or the cake, and in sentences in which disjunction is only preceded by negation, as in The Karate Man will give the Pooh Bear he could not lift the honey or the donut, Second, children’s knowledge of downward entailment is investigated in order to assess children’s knowledge of quantification. Beginning with Inhelder and Piaget (1964), children have been reported to have problems in interpreting sentences containing the universal quantifier every. These findings have recently been interpreted as showing that children and adults assign different semantic representations to sentences with the universal quantifier every (Philip, 1995; ii Drozd and van Loosbroek, 1998). A common assumption of these linguistic accounts is that children’s non-adult interpretation of sentences containing every fails to distinguish between the restrictor and the nuclear scope of the quantifier every. A Truth Value Judgment task was designed to evaluate this assumption. The findings, together with the results of previous research, show that children’s knowledge of quantification runs deeper than is anticipated either by recent linguistic accounts of children’s non-adult responses to universally quantified sentences or by input driven models of language development. Children’s adult-like knowledge of downward entailment and of the negative polarity item any stands in contrast with their non-adult interpretation of the positive polarity item some in negative sentences, e.g., The detective didn’t find some guys (see Musolino, 1998). To address this contrast, an experiment was conducted drawing upon the observation that negative statements are generally used to point out discrepancies between the facts and the listener’s expectations, and that this felicity condition was not satisfied in previous studies. The experimental findings show that children’s interpretation of indefinites in negative sentences is fully adult-like when the felicity conditions associated with negative statements are satisfied. The same picture emerges from the findings of a final iii experiment investigating children’s interpretation of sentences containing multiple scope bearing elements, as in Every farmer didn’t clean some animal. In sum, the experimental findings suggest that even in the domain of semantic competence, there is no reason to assume that child language differs from adult language in ways that would exceed the boundary conditions imposed by Universal Grammar, as maintained by the Continuity Assumption (Crain and Thornton, 1998; Pinker, 1984). iv Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor Stephen Crain. I started working with Stephen since my first days at the University of Maryland at College Park and I am not willing to stop! Much of what I learned from Stephen will be evident upon reading the dissertation. Of course, there’s Continuity and all that. There is something that might not transpire from reading the dissertation, however. That is the way Stephen guided me throughout my graduate studies. After I gave the committee members a copy of the dissertation, I was struck by how easy it all seemed to be. I owe this to Stephen, who led me through all the right steps and never let me feel the burden of what would come next. Stephen has provided me with a model that I will always look up to in my own career. Norbert Hornstein was the first person I met when I arrived at the University of Maryland. After five minutes with Norbert, I could tell I was in for a big change. I only wish it happened earlier. I have always looked forward to my meetings with Norbert, and I have always been impressed by how quickly he could see where I was going. I would like to thank Norbert for being so helpful and supportive throughout my entire graduate career. v I am also grateful for the opportunity to discuss my work with Paul Pietroski. Paul has always provided valuable suggestions concerning the details of my work, as well as the general direction of my research. He deserves special thanks for being so supportive of all aspects of my research project. The next person I would like to thank is Rozz Thornton. Rozz has been extremely helpful since my first days at Maryland. I am grateful for the time she spent with me at Center for Young Children always looking over my shoulder as I was learning how to conduct experiments. I would also like to thank Rozz for numerous comments on the dissertation draft. I would also like to thank John Horty for agreeing to serve on the dissertation committee as the Dean’s Representative. In addition to the committee members, I had the privilege of discussing some of my work with many people who were unlucky enough to be within reach. First, I would like to thank Julien Musolino for important and helpful discussions. Julien and I only overlapped for a few days at the University of Maryland in 1998. Initially, the overlap between our research interests was small. More recently, however, the overlap has become bigger and bigger. Eventually, we realized that we had to deal with it and write a paper together. And, since I can say pretty much all I want here, what a paper we wrote! I would also like to thank Martin Hackl, who was very helpful during his two years at the University of Maryland. I learned a lot from random conversations with Martin, and I really wished he was vi still at Maryland during the last stages of this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank all the faculty, students, and visitors of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland with whom I had the pleasure to work over the last five years. I would like to single out Scott Fults, Howard Lasnik, Juan Uriagereka and Amy Weinberg for discussing with me different parts of the dissertation. Furthermore, I gained valuable feedback from audiences at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (2001, 2002) the Linguistic Society of America (2001, 2002, 2003), NELS (2002), Sinn und Bedeutung (2002), MIT (Department of Linguistics and Philosophy) and Indiana University (Department of Speech and Hearing Science). In particular, I thank Danny Fox, Irene Heim, Jeff Lidz, Anna Papafragou, Anna Szabolcsi and Ken Wexler for discussion of the research documented in this dissertation. My graduate studies at the University of Maryland have been supported by the Linguistics Department through various Graduate Assistantships. My fifth year at Maryland was partially supported by a Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Graduate School. I gratefully acknowledge these sources for providing me peace of mind. I am also grateful to the organizers of the Boston University Conference on Language Development for the Paula Menyuk Travel award that allowed me to attend the conference in 2002. Before I started my graduate studies, I studied linguistics with Gennaro Chierchia and Maria Teresa Guasti. Gennaro and Teresa also helped me with my vii desire to pursue graduate studies in the US and I would like to thank them for their support. I also thank all the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at MIT, who gave me the opportunity to write the dissertation without having to worry (too much) about what would come next. During the past five years, I spent more time working on the premises of a pre-school than in university classrooms. All the experiments reported in this dissertation were conducted at the Center for Young Children (CYC) at the University of Maryland. I thank the children, teachers, and staff of that school for making this experience so enjoyable. In particular, I would like to thank Fran Favaretto and Anne Daniel for their invaluable support. Over the last few years I have come to appreciate the many virtues of the Truth Value Judgment task.
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