Abstract
This study examines children’s comprehension of quantifiers in Hebrew, using several tasks. We focused on a linguistic ambiguity related to universal quantifiers that express a distinction between collectivity and distributivity: all can be assigned with both a collective reading and a distributive reading (“a flower for all fairies” can be interpreted as an event with one flower or an event with multiple flowers), whereas each has a distributive reading only (“a flower for each fairy” is an event with multiple flowers). Unlike English, Hebrew has a single universal quantifier and thus, it expresses the collectivity/distributivity distinction using two morphosyntactic forms: one form (kol+ definite plural noun) is equivalent to all and has the two readings, and the other form (kol+ indefinite singular noun) is equivalent to each and has only one reading. We examined how Hebrew-speaking preschoolers (4-6 years) understand sentences in the two forms, and how they resolve the ambiguity of the ambiguous form, while focusing on the type and presence of contrast in three preference tasks: Experiment 1 used a conventional picture-matching task where the collective and distributive meanings were contrasted using two pictures (meaning contrast); Experiment 2 used a sentence-matching task where the two morphosyntactic forms were contrasted using two sentences (linguistic contrast); and Experiment 3 used a novel drawing task including instructions in one form (no contrast). In all tasks, adults showed a consistent response pattern, matching the ambiguous form (equivalent to all) to the collective reading and the distributive form (equivalent to each) to the distributive reading. Children, on the other hand, were extremely affected by the task, showing adult-like performance pattern in the picture-matching task, but not in the other tasks. This suggests that children can distinguish between the two morphosyntactic forms, but they do not fully attain adults’ preference pattern. The differences between the tasks can be attributed to the salience of the contrast, task experience, or working memory. The results highlight the need for a careful selection of language tasks both in basic research and in clinical assessment.
Highlights
What speakers know about language is sometimes not fully expressed in how they behave in certain linguistic tasks
We focused on universal quantifiers, such as “all” and “each,” which express the idea that a certain property applies to the entire group
This study focuses on one phenomenon, the collective/distributive distinction, and its relation to the comprehension of universal quantifiers (e.g., “all”/“each”)
Summary
What speakers know about language is sometimes not fully expressed in how they behave in certain linguistic tasks. This is especially evident when testing children, who often show a competence-performance distinction (e.g., Crain and Fodor, 1989). It is crucial to understand the effect of different language tasks in order to properly assess children’s linguistic knowledge, even when testing one specific aspect (e.g., Crain and Thornton, 2000; Schmitt and Miller, 2010). We used three different comprehension (preference) tasks to assess children’s knowledge of the collective/distributive distinction and examine the effects of task on their performance. The findings could contribute to our understanding of children’s comprehension of quantifiers, and possibly inform clinical assessment
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