Biomedical subjects

Julien Musolino

Publications and source records attributed to Julien Musolino.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

The semantics and acquisition of number words: integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives.

This article brings together two independent lines of research on numerally quantified expressions, e.g. two girls. One stems from work in linguistic theory and asks what truth conditional contributions such expressions make to the utterances in which they are used--in other words, what do numerals mean? The other comes from the study of language development and asks when and how children learn the meaning of such expressions. My goal is to show that when integrated, these two perspectives can both constrain and enrich each other in ways hitherto not considered. Specifically, work in linguistic theory suggests that in addition to their 'exactly n' interpretation, numerally quantified NPs such as two hoops can also receive an 'at least n' and an 'at most n' interpretation, e.g. you need to put two hoops on the pole to win (i.e. at least two hoops) and you can miss two shots and still win (i.e. at most two shots). I demonstrate here through the results of three sets of experiments that by the age of 5 children have implicit knowledge of the fact that expressions like two N can be interpreted as 'at least two N' and 'at most two N' while they do not yet know the meaning of corresponding expressions such as at least/most two N which convey these senses explicitly. I show that these results have important implications for theories of the semantics of numerals and that they raise new questions for developmental accounts of the number vocabulary.

Child Development↗

PubMed2003

Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface.

In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some professors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Some professors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Recent studies on the development of pragmatics suggest that preschool children are often insensitive to such implicatures when they interpret scalar terms (Cognition 78 (2001) 165; Chierchia, G., Crain, S., Guasti, M.T., Gualmini, A., & Meroni, L. (2001). The acquisition of disjunction: evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicatures. In A.H.-J. Do, L. Dominguez, & A. Johansen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 157-168). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press; Musolino, J., & Lidz, J. (2002). Preschool logic: truth and felicity in the acquisition of quantification. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A.H.-J. Do, Proceedings of the 26th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 406-416). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press). This conclusion raises two important questions: (a) are all scalar terms treated in the same way by young children?, and (b) does the child's difficulty reflect a genuine inability to derive scalar implicatures or is it due to demands imposed by the experimental task on an otherwise pragmatically savvy child? Experiment 1 addresses the first question by testing a group of 30 5-year-olds and 30 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on three different scales, ( ), ( ) and ( ). In each case, subjects were presented with contexts which satisfied the semantic content of the stronger (i.e. more informative) terms on each scale (i.e. all, three and finish) but were described using the weaker terms of the scales (i.e. some, two, start). We found that, while adults overwhelmingly rejected these infelicitous descriptions, children almost never did so. Children also differed from adults in that their rejection rate on the numerical scale was reliably higher than on the two other scales. In order to address question (b), we trained a group of 30 5-year-olds to detect infelicitous statements. We then presented them with modified versions of the stories of Experiment 1, which now more readily invited scalar inferences. These manipulations gave rise to significantly higher rejection rates than those observed in Experiment 1. Overall, these findings indicate that children do not treat all scalar terms alike and, more importantly, that children's ability to derive scalar implicatures is affected by their awareness of the goal of the task. Developmental and methodological implications as well as theoretical implications for the semantics of numeral terms are discussed.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMed2002

Children's command of quantification.

In this article we present data from two sets of experiments designed to investigate how children and adult speakers of English and Kannada (Dravidian) interpret scopally ambiguous sentences containing numerally quantified noun phrases and negation (e.g. Donald didn't find two guys). We use this kind of sentence as a way to find evidence in children's linguistic representations for the hierarchical structure and the abstract relations defined over these structures (in particular, the relation of c-command) that linguists take to be at the core of grammatical knowledge. Specifically, we uncover the existence of systematic differences in the way that children and adult speakers resolve these ambiguities, independent of the language they speak. That is, while adults can easily access either scope interpretation, 4-year-old children display a strong preference for the scopal interpretation of the quantified elements which corresponds to their surface syntactic position. Crucially, however, we show that children's interpretations are constrained by the surface hierarchical relations (i.e. the c-command relations) between these elements and not by their linear order. Children's non-adult interpretations are therefore informative about the nature of the syntactic representations they entertain and the rules they use to determine the meaning of a sentence from its structure.

Child↗