Abstract
Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children’s language input. In this paper, we report an experimental investigation on children’s comprehension of two NPIs and two PPIs in German. Based on corpus data indicating that the four tested PSIs are present in child-directed speech but rare in young children’s utterances, we conducted an auditory rating task with adults and 11- to 12-year-old children. The results demonstrate that, even at 11–12 years of age, children do not yet show a completely target-like comprehension of the investigated PSIs. While they are adult-like in their responses to one of the tested NPIs, their responses did not demonstrate a categorical distinction between licensed and unlicensed PSI uses for the other tested expressions. The effect was led by a higher acceptance of sentences containing unlicensed PSIs, indicating a lack of awareness for their distributional restrictions. The results of our study pose new questions for the developmental time scale of the acquisition of polarity items.
Highlights
Polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) are words or multi-word expressions that are limited in their distribution to a range of so-called licensing environments (Chierchia 2004, 2013; Giannakidou 1998, 2019; Israel 1996, 2011; Krifka 1995; Ladusaw 1979; Szabolcsi 2004; among others)
We found an interaction between the licensing status and the contrast between negative polarity items (NPIs) and positive polarity items (PPIs) ( β = 0.53, CrI = [0.08, 0.98], P(β > 0) = 0.99)9: In licensed
There was weak evidence for higher naturalness ratings for the PPI conditions compared to the NPI conditions ( β = 0.41, CrI = [− 0.09, 0.91], P(β > 0) = 0.95), which may reflect a preference for non-negated utterances in general, or integration costs of licensed NPIs—an effect that was absent in adults
Summary
Polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) are words or multi-word expressions that are limited in their distribution to a range of so-called licensing environments (Chierchia 2004, 2013; Giannakidou 1998, 2019; Israel 1996, 2011; Krifka 1995; Ladusaw 1979; Szabolcsi 2004; among others). The environments that license NPIs and/or anti-license PPIs themselves are extremely varied—in addition to sentential negation as in (1a), NPIs can be licensed under the scope of negative quantifiers like no or nobody (2a), under downwardentailing operators like few (3a), in nonveridical contexts like questions (4a) or the antecedent of conditionals (5a), and in superlatives (6a). Other (so-called strong) NPIs, by contrast, are licensed only in the strongest negative environments (e.g., either, which is only licensed in at least anti-additive environments). Similar patterns arise for PPIs: Already is acceptable in questions (4b), conditionals (5b) and superlatives (6b), while the PPI some is acceptable under downward-entailing operators like few (Few people had eaten something for breakfast)
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