Korean-speaking Children’s Acquisition of Interpretations of Scopally Ambiguous Sentences: Numeral Quantifiers and Negation

Abstract

This study investigates Korean-speaking four-and five-year-old children’s and adults’ interpretations of scopally ambiguous sentences containing a postnominal numeral quantifier and short-form negation in Korean by conducting two experiments. Experiment 1 investigated interpretive preferences for sentences containing short-form negation an and numerically quantified noun phrases (NPs) in object position. Both Korean-speaking children and adults were found to display a preference for the specific interpretation while children accepted the non-specific interpretation far less frequently than did adults. Experiment 2 explored the role of certain contextual factors in children’s access to the non-specific interpretation. It was found that when a target sentence is preceded by an affirmative sentence carrying contrastive information, children, like adults, could accept the non-specific interpretation without difficulty. The findings are discussed in the framework of O’Grady’s (2008) processor-based emergentist approach that highlights the role of processing factors.