Children's Acquisition of Homogeneity in Plural Definite Descriptions.

ABSTRACT: Plural definite descriptions give rise to homogeneity effects: the positive The trucks are blue and the negative The trucks aren't blue 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 homogeneous 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 maximally (Munn et al., 2006, see also Royle et al., 2018), two other studies report that preschoolers allow non-maximal

SUBMITTER: Tieu L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6856947 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature