Magdalena Roszkowski: The acquisition of plural expressions

V rámci Roman Jakobson seminar vás srdečně zveme na přednášku Magdaleny Roszkowski z Central European University ve Vídni, která se uskuteční v rámci jejího doktorského výzkumu v oblasti osvojování sémantiky.

Přednáška se uskuteční v angličtině 15. května 2025 ve 14:00 v učebně D31. Těšíme se na vaši účast!

Abstrakt:
In this talk I will address how children acquire various constructions that involve plural expressions and present three studies which investigate children's early representational capacities, the relationship between linguistic and conceptual development and principles that support the mapping between language and the world. The first study used a structural priming paradigm to test whether cumulative and distributive interpretations of ambiguous plural sentences elicit priming effects in preschool-aged children, i.e. before they reliably master the truth-conditions of distributive universal quantifiers. The findings reveal priming effects for both cumulative and distributive interpretations in the absence of overt disambiguating elements, suggesting that children may have available certain logical representations prior to achieving adult-like competence with the corresponding lexical items. The second study employed an eye-tracking rule-learning paradigm to explore whether already preverbal infants have access to the concept of exhaustivity, a notion that may later play a role in the acquisition of universal quantifiers. The results were inconclusive, leaving the question open of whether the concept of exhaustivity is available preverbally. The third study examined how preschoolers interpret definite singular and plural descriptions in scenarios that involve non-maximal and heterogeneous referents through a truth-value judgment task. The findings show that children are receptive to both types of violations, indicating an early sensitivity to the vague nature of language and gaps in the extension of natural language expressions. Taken together the results provide evidence for an early ability to form complex semantic representations and to navigate the uncertainty associated with certain linguistic expressions, while also pointing to potential differences between linguistic and non-linguistic representations.