Children’s ambiguous understanding of weak and strong quantifiers

Despite suggestions in the literature that the semantics of many might be the key for understanding children’s non-adult-like interpretations of quantified sentences (cf. Drozd 2001, Geurts 2003), experimental data on the acquisition of weak quantifiers like many is rare. This paper investigates children’s comprehension of weak (many) versus strong (many of, all) quantifiers in English. In particular, by means of a truthvalue judgment task, taking the semantic and syntactic characteristics of many into account, we tested whether 28 children aged between four and seven understand the ambiguous nature of many as described in the literature (Partee, 1988) and whether they transfer this ambiguity to many of and all. The results show that children have an ambiguous quantifier system for both strong and weak quantifiers. This runs counter the idea that the child always prefers a reading of many in which the arguments seem to ‘switch’ (as for adults in Many French have won the Tour de France, resulting in the interpretation Many Tour de France winners are French), as predicted by Drozd and Van Loosbroek’s (1999) Weak Quantification Hypothesis. On the basis of our experimental results on children’s understanding of both weak and strong quantifiers, we conclude that children’s non-adult interpretations of quantified sentences are due to the ambiguous nature of (weak) quantifiers. This presents the language learner with the difficult, but necessary, task to distinguish between those different kinds of readings and understand their different semantic and syntactic representations in order to converge with the target language.