Tieu Lyn, Križ Manuel, Chemla Emmanuel
Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), School of Education, MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia.
Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Front Psychol. 2019 Nov 6;10:2329. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02329. eCollection 2019.
Plural definite descriptions give rise to effects: the positive and the negative are both neither true nor false when some of the trucks are blue and some are not, that is, when the group of trucks is not with respect to the property of being blue (Löbner, 1987, 2000; Schwarzschild, 1994; Križ, 2015b). The only existing acquisition studies related to the phenomenon have examined children's comprehension only of the affirmative versions of such sentences, and moreover have yielded conflicting data; while one study reports that preschoolers interpret definite plurals (Munn et al., 2006, see also Royle et al., 2018), two other studies report that preschoolers allow interpretations of definite plurals where adults do not (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Caponigro et al., 2012). Moreover, there is no agreed upon developmental trajectory to adult homogeneity. In this paper, we turn to acquisition data to investigate the predictions of a recent analysis of homogeneity that treats homogeneous meanings as the result of a scalar implicature (Magri, 2014). We conducted two experiments targeting 4- and 5-year-old French-speaking children's interpretations of plural definite descriptions in positive and negative sentences, and tested the same children on standard cases of scalar implicature. The experiments revealed three distinct subgroups of children: those who interpreted the plural definite descriptions existentially and failed to compute implicatures; those who both accessed homogeneous interpretations and computed implicatures; and finally, a smaller subgroup of children who appeared to access homogeneous interpretations without computing implicatures. We discuss the implications of our findings, which appear to speak against the implicature theory as the adult-like means of generating homogeneous meanings.
当一些卡车是蓝色而一些不是时，即当卡车群体在蓝色属性方面不具有一致性时（Löbner，1987年、2000年；Schwarzschild，1994年；Križ，2015b），肯定形式和否定形式既非真也非假。现有的与该现象相关的习得研究仅考察了儿童对这类句子肯定形式的理解，而且得出了相互矛盾的数据；一项研究报告称学龄前儿童对限定复数进行存在性解释（Munn等人，2006年，另见Royle等人，2018年），而另外两项研究报告称学龄前儿童允许对限定复数进行成人不允许的解释（Karmiloff-Smith，1979年；Caponigro等人，2012年）。此外，对于通向成人一致性的发展轨迹并没有达成共识。在本文中，我们借助习得数据来研究一种近期对一致性的分析所做的预测，该分析将一致性意义视为量级含义推导的结果（Magri，2014年）。我们进行了两项实验，针对4岁和5岁说法语的儿童对肯定句和否定句中复数限定描述的解释，并就量级含义的标准案例对同一批儿童进行测试。实验揭示了三类不同的儿童亚组：那些对复数限定描述进行存在性解释且未推导含义的儿童；那些既采用一致性解释又推导含义的儿童；最后，还有一小部分儿童似乎采用了一致性解释但未推导含义。我们讨论了研究结果的意义，这些结果似乎与将含义理论作为产生一致性意义的类似成人方式的观点相悖。
