Children\u27s insensitivity to contrastive stress in sentences with only

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Universal quantification in children’s English

Researchers since Inhelder and Piaget (1964) have replicated a curious finding. When using a picture-verification task (e.g., a picture of four elephants, three of them being ridden by boys), children have been shown to supply a non-adult answer in response to a question such as ‘Is every boy riding an elephant?’, e.g. ‘no, not that one’ (pointing to the extra elephant). The question we will address here is whether or not this response by children reflects a non-adult linguistic semantic representation of the meaning of the universal quantifier. Non-adult accounts of children’s interpretation of the universal quantifier (‘every’) suggest that children answer ‘no’ to questions like ‘Is every boy riding an elephant?’ because they may not initially interpret the subject set of ‘boys’ as the restrictor of every. By contrast, adult-like accounts of children’s interpretation of every maintain that children do correctly interpret the set of ‘boys’ as the restrictor of every in such sentences, suggesting that children’s non-adult responses can be eliminated by satisfying contextual demands on the use of the universal quantifier. In this paper, we present longitudinal data from 4 two-year-old children, children far younger than have previously been studied experimentally. We show that even from the earliest stages of language acquisition, so long as sentences are presented in felicitous discourse contexts, children’s interpretation of universal quantification appears adult-like. The data therefore support the adult-like accounts of children’s acquisition of universal quantification

ALHAT System Validation

NASA has embarked on a multiyear technology development effort to develop a safe and precise lunar landing capability. The Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) Project is investigating a range of landing hazard detection methods while developing a hazard avoidance capability to best field test the proper set of relevant autonomous GNC technologies. Ultimately, the advancement of these technologies through the ALHAT Project will provide an ALHAT System capable of enabling next generation lunar lander vehicles to globally land precisely and safely regardless of lighting condition. This paper provides an overview of the ALHAT System and describes recent validation experiments that have advanced the highly capable GNC architecture

Two Negations for the Price of One

Standard English is typically described as a double negation language. In double negation ­languages, each negative marker contributes independent semantic force. Two negations in the same clause usually cancel each other out, resulting in an affirmative sentence. Other dialects of English permit negative concord. In negative concord sentences, the two negative markers yield a single semantic negation. This paper explores how English-speaking children interpret sentences with more than one negative element, in order to assess whether their early grammar allows negative concord. According to Zeijlstra’s (2004) typological generalization, if a language has a negative syntactic head, it will be a negative concord language. Since Standard English is often analysed as having a negative head, it represents an apparent exception to Zeijlstra’s ­generalization. This raises the intriguing possibility that initially, children recognize that English has a negative head (i.e., 'n’t') and, therefore, assign negative concord interpretations to sentences with two negations, despite the absence of evidence for this interpretation in the adult input. The present study investigated this possibility in a comprehension study with 20 3- to 5-year-old ­children and a control group of 15 adults. The test sentences were presented in contexts that made them amenable to either a double negation or a negative concord interpretation. As expected, the adult participants assigned the double negation interpretation of the test sentences the majority of the time. In contrast, the child participants assigned the alternative, negative concord interpretation the majority of the time. Children must jettison the negative concord interpretation of sentences with two negative markers, and acquire a double negation interpretation. We propose that the requisite positive evidence is the appearance of negative expressions like 'nothing 'in object position. Because such expressions exert semantic force without a second negation, this informs children that they are acquiring a double negation language