A pilot study of quantification in child Catalan

Abstract

Summary: Since the work of Inhelder and Piaget, children have been known to interpret universal quantifiers differently from adults; in this paper we present the first experimental results on the interpretation of the universal quantifier tots ‘all’ by speakers of Catalan aged 3 to 7. We observe an early stage (ages 3 to 4) in which children incur in underexhaustive and overexhaustive errors; while the first disappear at a later stage (at age 5), overexhaustive errors persist all through the period examined. Further, crosslinguistic evidence can be adduced to show that the asymmetry between subject and object underlying this kind of errors extends beyond the empirical domain of quantifiers. [Keywords: Acquisition; universal quantifiers; Catalan; overexhaustive search; underexhaustive search]