Logico-semantic Aspects of Children’s Knowledge about the Universal Quantifier: New Empirical Evidence

It has been widely assumed that a universal quantifier such as every evokes an asymmetry among entailments in its first argument (i.e., the NP) and its second argument (i.e., the VP). In particular, the first argument of every is downward entailing (henceforth DE), whereas its second argument is non-downward entailing (non-DE). Entailment-sensitive linguistic phenomena, arising as a consequence of these asymmetric entailments, are evident at various levels of representation. This paper discusses the linguistic representation of sentences with universal quantification and the consequences of asymmetric entailment in universal quantification at the logico-semantic level from an acquisition point of view; specifically, is children’s knowledge of the universal quantifier and its asymmetric pattern of entailments, previously examined with respect to within-sentence meanings, also reflected in their computation of logical inferences across universally-quantified sentences? We present a new experimental methodology and results which directly address whether children’s knowledge extends to the computation of across-sentence meaning relations involving every. We begin our discussion by reviewing the consequences of asymmetric entailment for within-sentential and across-sentential meanings.