A cross-linguistic study of children's comprehension of universal quantifiers: a comparison of Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and English

Abstract

The development of children's grasp of lexical cues to universal quantification was investigated in 3- to 10-year-olds and in adult native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and English. The experiments focused on children's acquisition of the English quantifiers all and each and their counterparts in Mandarin and Portuguese. Participants selected best-fitting interpretations of sentences containing universal quantification from sets of pictures portraying collective, distributive, and exhaustive states or activities. The collective representation corresponds to the meaning of all in 'All of the turtles are in a tank', with the 'group' interpretation that all the turtles are in the same tank. The distributive representation assumes a pairing and is canonically associated with each. For the sentence 'Each turtle is in a tank', turtles and tanks would ideally be in one-to-one correspondence. The exhaustive representation corresponds to the favoured inter pretation of sentences with two plural definite noun phrases. For the sentence 'The turtles are in the tanks', sets of turtles and tanks would be associated exhaustively with each other with none left over. The results of the picture selection task demonstrate that children learning Mandarin and Portuguese acquire correspon dences between collective and the distributive interpretations and natural language expressions by age five. For young American children the universal quantifiers all and each are not closely coupled with collective and distributive interpretations initially. Children learning English gradually master a whole system of cues which jointly influence quantifier interpretation. Across the languages tested, strong evidence for the early availability of an exhaustive representation was not found.