Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers.

Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for "all," "none," "some," "some…not," and "most" in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language- and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the National Academy of Sciences via http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.160134111

Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT)

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations

A crosslinguistic study of symmetrical judgments

A longstanding puzzle in developmental linguistics is why children are more permissive than adults in assigning distributive interpretations to sentences with the universal quantifiers each, every, and all under certain experimental conditions. One well-known controversial issue in this area is children’s symmetrical judgments of universally quantified sentences. Symmetrical judgments are elicited when a child is asked to judge if a sentence including a universal quantifier describes a visual context depicting an incomplete distributive relation. The following three judgment types have been included in the set of symmetrical judgment types in the literature (examples from Kang, 2001).peer-reviewe

Slovak

Kesselová Jana, Slančová Daniela. Slovak. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 88, fasc. 3, 2010. Langues et littératures modernes. pp. 873-896

A crosslinguistic study of symmetrical judgments

A longstanding puzzle in developmental linguistics is why children are more permissive than adults in assigning distributive interpretations to sentences with the universal quantifiers each, every, and all under certain experimental conditions. One well-known controversial issue in this area is children’s symmetrical judgments of universally quantified sentences. Symmetrical judgments are elicited when a child is asked to judge if a sentence including a universal quantifier describes a visual context depicting an incomplete distributive relation. The following three judgment types have been included in the set of symmetrical judgment types in the literature (examples from Kang, 2001)Lituanistikos katedraUžsienio kalbų, lit. ir vert. s. katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta