2018 Sat Session A 1445

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session A, East Balcony | 2:45pm

A cross-linguistic investigation of symmetrical judgments
K. Drozd, D. Anđjelković, M. Savić, K. Drozd, D. Anᵭjelković, M. Savić, O. Toškovic, A. Gavarró, A. Lite, G. Hržica, M. Kovačević, J. Kuvač Kraljević, A. Skordi, K. Jensen de Lopez, L. Sundahl, A. van Hout, B. Hollebrandse, M. van Koert, E. Fabre, A. Hubert, I Noveck, S. Ott, K. Yatsushiro, I. Balčiūnienė, J. Ruzaitė, M. Vija, D. Gatt, H. Grech, E. Haman, D. Kiebzak-Mandera, A. Miękisz, N. Gagarina, J. Puzanova, M. Popović, S. Kapalova, D. Slančová, N. Smith, U. Sauerland, H. van der Lely

Children’s symmetrical judgments Exhaustive Pairing (EP), UnderExhaustive Pairing (UP), and Extended Domain (ED) (see Figures 1-3 below) show that children are prone to assign a wider range of distributive interpretations to universally quantified sentences than adults under certain experimental conditions (Philip,1995). Although EP judgments, in particular, have been studied intensively and have been elicited in a number of languages including Russian, Catalan, and Korean, variation in experimental designs, materials and results preclude a systematic crosslinguistic metaanalysis. Moreover, too few reports of UP and ED judgments exist to draw clear generalizations. Our experiment investigated EP, UP, and ED judgments in 12 European languages using a single experimental design and methodology to explore to what extent cross-linguistic variation has an impact on children’s comprehension of distributive universal quantification.

Experiment
Method: 291 children (50-71 months) and 277 adult controls judged whether pre-recorded transitive sentences with an allQP subject described hand-drawn pictures with depicting Extra Agent (EA), Extra Object (EO), Extra Agent&Object (EAO) contexts displayed on a laptop computer (see Figures 1-3), where allQP represents one of the 7 QP types across a 12 language sample (see Table 1).

Preliminary Results
Uniform performance: A Generalized Linear Model (logit) analysis with Laplace Approximation [glmerMod] with age group (child, adult), QP type (QP1-7), and context (EA,EO,EAO) as fixed effects revealed strikingly uniform response patterns across languages. Overall, (1) the adults significantly outperformed the children across QP types, and contexts (p < .0001) and (2) the children produced EP judgments (58%) significantly more often than ED judgments (46%) and ED judgments significantly more often than UP judgments (18%) across QP types (p <.0001). Post-hoc comparisons confirmed this pattern for each individual language except Lithuanian (ED > EP > UP). These comparative results are consistent with previous research.

ED judgments: Our experiment elicited considerably higher frequencies of ED judgments overall from children (46%) than previous experiments. ED judgment rates varied considerably across QP types (19% (QP7 Maltese) to 66% (QP5 Russian)). QP7 Maltese children performed statistically no differently than adults on EAO trials (p < .001). We discuss several possible explanations for these results, including the hypothesis that the structure of Maltese QPs represents an advantage for learning quantifier domain restriction principles.

Longitudinal analysis: Previous studies report increases in EP judgments and decreases in ED and UP judgments with age (e.g., Aravind et al, 2017; Philip, 1995). Our results reveal no significant increase in EP judgments or decrease in ED judgments between different child age groups (Group 1: 50-57 months, Group 2: 58-64 months, Group 3: 65-71). However, we did find a significant decrease in UP judgments between Group 1 and Group 2 ( p < .05) and between Group 2 and Group 3 (p < .005).

We discuss the implications of our results for theoretical accounts of symmetrical judgments and the acquisition of numerical and logical quantifiers and for adopting UP and ED judgments as developmental markers for atypical language development and language deficits.

References

Aravind, Athulya, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Christopher J. Lonigan, Beth M. Phillips, Jeanine Clancy, Susan H. Landry, Paul R. Swank, Michael Assel, Heather B. Taylor, Nancy Eisenberg, Tracy Spinrad, and Carlos Valiente. 2017. Children’s quantification with every over time. Glossa 2 (1). 1-16.

Philip, William (1995): Event Quantification in the Acquisition of Universal Quantification, Amherst, MA., UMass doctoral dissertation.