The Nature of the Semantic Stimulus

The Acquisition of Every as a Case Study
dc.bibliographicCitation.firstPage339
dc.bibliographicCitation.issue2
dc.bibliographicCitation.lastPage375
dc.bibliographicCitation.volume29
dc.contributor.affiliationRasin, Ezer; Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
dc.contributor.affiliationAravind, Athulya; MIT, Cambridge, USA
dc.contributor.authorRasin, Ezer
dc.contributor.authorAravind, Athulya
dc.date.accessioned2024-02-26T16:21:35Z
dc.date.available2024-02-26T16:21:35Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.date.updated2023-05-15T00:54:14Z
dc.description.abstractWe evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics (as opposed to the input in syntax or phonology) is rich enough to systematically eliminate instances of the subset problem of language acquisition: overly general hypotheses about the meaning of every can violate pragmatic constraints, making such hypotheses incompatible with the child’s input. Our second finding is that the semantic input is too poor to eliminate instances of what we refer to as the superset problem, the mirror image of the subset problem. We argue that at least some overly specific hypotheses about the meaning of every are compatible with the child’s input, suggesting either that those hypotheses are not made available by UG or that non-trivial inductive biases are involved in children’s acquisition of every.
dc.description.sponsorshipUniversität Leipzig (1039)
dc.identifier.doi10.1007/s11050-020-09168-6
dc.identifier.urihttp://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/2977
dc.language.isoen
dc.relation.issn0925-854X
dc.relation.journalNatural Language Semantics
dc.rightsL::CC BY 4.0
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject.ddcddc:420
dc.subject.fieldlinguistics
dc.titleThe Nature of the Semantic Stimulus
dc.title.alternativeThe Acquisition of Every as a Case Study
dc.typearticle
dc.type.versionpublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typePublication
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