Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages

Abstract

The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children’s non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children’s non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. Analyzing these patterns in detail, it appears that child learners across languages have problems with tense-aspect forms with variable meanings, in contrast to forms with a one-to-one form/meaning mappings which are acquired earlier. While adults use a context-sensitive interpretation of forms with multiple meanings, various semantic-pragmatic sources can explain children’s difficulties with interpreting such forms. All explanations that we identify across child languages rely on children’s immature command of pragmatic reasoning, albeit in very different ways for the three different patterns. Thus, by taking a crosslinguistic semantic approach and integrating detailed insights from the tense-aspect semantics of specific languages with universal pragmatic effects, we explain the non-adultlike interpretation of telic sentences in a variety of child languages in a comprehensive way.

Event end-state encoding in 13-month-olds—completed and non-completed events are different

“…This finding casts doubt on the hypothesis that children's interpretation errors with change-of-state and incremental theme verbs have a non-linguistic origin. The results are consistent with previous accounts that attributed these errors to eventlanguage mappings in children's acquisition of verb meanings, such as Martin et al (2020), who recently reviewed a large body of work on children's errors with changeof-state and incremental theme verbs and concluded that these errors are due to language-specific learning challenges. By adding evidence from a non-linguistic task and showing the same pattern for two different event types, we further strengthen their conclusion that non-linguistic conceptual biases may not be to blame.…”

“…By adding evidence from a non-linguistic task and showing the same pattern for two different event types, we further strengthen their conclusion that non-linguistic conceptual biases may not be to blame. Instead, it is likely that children struggle as they explore the typological spaces in which their language might reside (e.g., Talmy, 1991), as well as the complexity of how completion is realized in tense/aspect marking across languages (e.g., Martin et al, 2020).…”

“…But a large body of work shows that children acquiring English as well as other languages often misinterpret predicates that denote changes, including predicates with incremental theme verbs and change-of-state verbs (Gentner, 1978;Gropen et al, 1991;Jeschull, 2007;Martin et al, 2020;Ogiela, 2007;Patt et al, 2020;Schulz, 2018;Schulz et al, 2001; van Hout, 1998;Wittek, 2002). For instance, they are more likely to use 'fill' to mean "pouring" rather than "something being made full", to use 'empty' to mean "dumping" rather than "something being made vacant" (Gropen et al, 1991), and to use 'mix' rather than "stir" even when the substance is nonmixable (Gentner, 1978).…”

Untitled

“…After Verkuyl (1972), there is no doubt about encoding boundedness through articles, determiners, quantifiers, etc., and non-boundedness through their absence. But how these entities trigger boundedness and their absence non-boundedness remains undescribed (Czardybon and Fleischhauer 2014, Fleischhauer and Czardybon 2016, Filip 2017, Ihsane 2020, Martin et al 2020. Verkuyl (1993Verkuyl ( , 2022 explains it using formal semantic analyses; Kabakčiev's (2000; model uses temporality of situation participants as an approach.…”

On how Compositional Aspect and the Article-Aspect Interplay Ought to Appear in English Comprehensive Grammars

“…After Verkuyl (1972), there is no doubt about encoding boundedness through articles, determiners, quantifiers, etc., and non-boundedness through their absence. But how these entities trigger boundedness and their absence non-boundedness remains undescribed (Czardybon and Fleischhauer 2014, Fleischhauer and Czardybon 2016, Filip 2017, Ihsane 2020, Martin et al 2020. Verkuyl (1993Verkuyl ( , 2022 explains it using formal semantic analyses; Kabakčiev's (2000;2019) model uses temporality of situation participants as an approach.…”