Do children understand how different numbers are related before they associate them with specific cardinalities? We explored how children rely on two abstract relations – contrast and entailment – to reason about the meanings of ‘unknown’ number words. Previous studies argue that, because children give variable amounts when asked to give an unknown number, all unknown numbers begin with an existential meaning akin to some. In Experiment 1, we tested an alternative hypothesis, that because numbers belong to a scale of (...) contrasting alternatives, children assign them a meaning distinct from some. In the “Don’t Give-a-Number task”, children were shown three kinds of fruit (apples, bananas, strawberries), and asked to not give either some or a number of one kind (e.g. Give everything, but not [some/five] bananas). While children tended to give zero bananas when asked to not give some, they gave positive amounts when asked to not give numbers. This suggests that contrast – plus knowledge of a number’s membership in a count list – enables children to differentiate the meanings of unknown number words from the meaning of some. Experiment 2 tested whether children’s interpretation of unknown numbers is further constrained by understanding numerical entailment relations – that if someone, e.g. has three, they thereby also have two, but if they do not have three, they also do not have four. On critical trials, children saw two characters with different quantities of fish, two apart (e.g. 2 vs. 4), and were asked about the number inbetween – who either has or doesn’t have, e.g. three. Children picked the larger quantity for the affirmative, and the smaller for the negative prompts even when all the numbers were unknown, suggesting that they understood that, whatever three means, a larger quantity is more likely to contain that many, and a smaller quantity is more likely not to. We conclude by discussing how contrast and entailment could help children scaffold the exact meanings of unknown number words. (shrink)

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative as compared to the prepositional dative. We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds. In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the double object frame, even though we provided more contextual support. In Experiment 2, we tested a novel hypothesis that children would comprehend novel verbs in, and generalize them to, the double object frame if they were first familiarized to the verbs in the prepositional (...) frame. They did, suggesting that part of their difficulty with the double object frame is due to uncertainty about a new verb's semantic/syntactic properties, information that the easy-to-comprehend prepositional frame provides. The benefits of training were short-lived, however; children again struggled after a 2-h delay. The results are discussed in the context of mechanisms underlying verb acquisition. (shrink)

La spécificité de la faculté de langage est l’objet d’une controverse fondamentale entre les représentants de la modularité de l’esprit et spécifiquement d’une grammaire universelle modulaire concernée seulement par la modélisation de la compétence linguistique — communément désignés comme "formalistes" — et les défenseurs d’une vision fonctionaliste dont la dominante peut être pragmatique ou cognitive. Le propos de cet article est en premier lieu d’éclairer le débat épistémologique entre fonctionalisme et formalisme en linguistique. Puis, après avoir évoqué brièvement la corrélation (...) entre les universaux cognitifs et les universaux du langage, je présenterai les arguments de chercheurs d’orientation fonctionaliste sur l’innéité des propriétés du langage et sur le ‘paradoxe’ de l’acquisition des structures linguistiques selon Jackendoff, avant d’évoquer deux tentatives de simulation par réseaux neuronaux de l’ontogénèse du langage et de la transmission des langues. La première concerne la constitution et la stabilisation de la syntaxe de la transitivité et de la relativisation, la seconde illustre la nécessité de prendre en compte les exigences communicationnelles du locuteur et celles de l’allocutaire pour simuler la transmission efficace de signes linguistiques entre deux générations de locuteurs. (shrink)