Restricting quantifier scope in Dutch: Evidence from child language comprehension and production

Abstract

In this study, we tested 4to 6-year-old Dutch children and adults on their comprehension and production of indefinite subjects and objects in universally quantified sentences. Our comprehension results show that, whereas the adults showed a strong preference for indefinite subjects to refer to specific entities, corresponding to a wide scope interpretation for the indefinite subject, the children overwhelmingly accepted non-specific referents for indefinite subjects, corresponding to a narrow scope interpretation. In the production task, however, the children, like the adults, did not use indefinite subjects to express non-specific reference. Although this seems to indicate that children’s non-adult-like performance with indefinite subjects is limited to comprehension, their pattern of production was slightly different from that of adults, too. We suggest that this may be due to a non-adult-like ranking of constraints on specificity and familiarity.