A psycholinguistic study concerning the interpretation of quantified expressions--generative grammar theory and language acquisition

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1. Ito 2005 examined how Japanese-speaking children interpret sentences containing sae 'even' in terms of its scope and implicatures (existential and scalar) by conducting experiments, and reported that: 1) Japanese children are unable to judge as infelicitous sentences that are infelicitous with context, a finding in partial agreement with Noveck 2001, and 2) Japanese children are insensitive to syntactic restrictions on the scope of sae, as shown by their incorrectly judging as felicitous a sentence infelicitous in context because sae was attached to an incorrect NP. The study, however, states that the first result renders the second inconclusive. This paper also considers three plausible explanations for the children's non-adult performance: the peculiar properties of sae, the children's lack of pragmatic knowledge, and processing cost. However, none of the evidence supports any one specific explanation.My paper (to appear) extends the scope of my 2005 study in two ways: it adopts t … More he experimental technique developed by Chierchia et al. 2001 and it tests their Processing Limitation hypothesis. The results reveal that the children's performance, although it shows that they are somewhat sensitive to pragmatic felicity associated with sae and the scope of sae as well, was nevertheless only slightly above chance level. This shows that the comparison and evaluation of information strength can be a problem in a task which does not impose processing demands on children.2. Ito 2006 investigated how Japanese-speaking children interpret bare NP arguments and NP arguments modified by the anaphor zibun in soo-su VP-ellipsis structures. Specifically examined is that whether or not they can access bound variable interpretations of null (determiner) pronouns and zibun when both have referential and quantificational NP antecedents. The results showed that it is difficult for Japanese children to associate the phonologically overt anaphoric element with quantificational antecedents as a bound variable. Less