1,720,967 research outputs found
Investigating the Form-Meaning Mapping in the Acquisition of English and Japanese Measure Phrase Comparatives
No full textWe present a set of experiments investigating how English- and Japanese-speaking children interpret Measure Phrase comparatives (e.g., X is 10 meters taller than Y / X-wa Y-yori 10-meters takai). We show that despite overt cues to the comparative interpretation (i.e., the comparative -er morpheme in English, and explicit linguistic and visual reference to a contextual standard), children representing both languages diverge from their adult counterparts in that they access a non-adult-like ‘absolute measurement’ interpretation (i.e., X is 10 meters tall). We propose to account for their response pattern by appealing to proposals by Svenonius and Kennedy (2006) and Sawada and Grano (2011) that Meas in the head of the DegP, which houses the differential, selects for an absolute minimal value: zero. We argue that young children appeal to this absolute zero minimum in lieu of the correct derived standard, and must learn to override this value by appealing to the context to set the standard of comparison when interpretation requires them to do so.Peer reviewe
A Note on Japanese Children’s Absolute Interpretation of Differential Verbal Expressions
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A Note on Japanese Children’s Absolute Interpretation of Differential Verbal Expressions
No full textA Linguistic Approach to Children’s Absolute Interpretation of Differential Comparatives
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An Analysis of Japanese-speaking Children’s Interpretation of Adjectives with Measure Phrases
No full textA Linguistic Approach to Children’s Absolute Interpretation of Differential Comparatives
No full textComparison problems are notoriously difficult for kids, which require them to determine a differential between two sets, e.g., “A boy has three apples and a girl has two apples. How many more apples does the boy have than the girl?” Even young school children wrongly answer the number of the boy’s apples, three, instead of answering the differential between the two sets of apples, namely one. Children seem to interpret the differential phrase, how many not as comparative but as absolute. This paper introduces a pilot experiment to settle a controversy over the source of children’s absolute interpretation: linguistic or cognitive, and shows their absolute interpretation is not caused by their limited cognitive resources for quantifying a differential between two sets. Another pilot experiment scrutinizes their absolute interpretation and reveals what underlying representation it has. Finally, reviewing previous semantic analyses of differential comparatives, we argue that child grammar lacks a functional head which introduces a degree argument and that this lack causes their absolute interpretation of differential comparatives
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