Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic…

The phenomenon of scalar diversity refers to the well-replicated finding that different scalar expressions give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) at different rates. Previous work has shown that part of the scalar diversity effect can be explained by theoretically motivated factors. Although the effect has been established only in controlled…

Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of "retrieval," whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither…

It is standardly believed that some occurrences of expressions designate singularly, while other occurrences of expressions designate plurally. For instance, the singular expression the student may be used on an occasion to talk about one particular student, while the plural expression the students may be used on an occasion to talk about several…

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

According to logical theories of meaning, a meaning of an expression can be formalized and encoded in truth conditions. Vagueness of the language and individual differences between people are a challenge to incorporate into the meaning representations. In this paper, we propose a new approach to study truth-conditional representations of vague…

German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne ('without') in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne 'with without'. We argue that this…

Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

The core of language disorders in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the loss of social function in language communication.Futher, the correct use and processing of personal pronouns is the basis of language social function. Therefore, clarifying the mechanism of processing the pronoun reference in children with ASD is a major focus…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

Pronouns can sometimes covary with a non c-commanding quantifier phrase (QP). To obtain such 'telescoping' readings, a semantic representation must be computed in which the QP's semantic scope extends beyond its surface scope. Non-native speakers have been claimed to have more difficulty than native speakers deriving such non-isomorphic…

The purpose of this study was to consider the core of the mental lexicon of the Kazakh language based on the analysis of associative dictionaries, to determine the basic lexico-semantic groups of words and to compare the basic lexical layer with value categories. This study uses the following methods of linguocultural, comparative,…

Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers, ontological count and mass nouns, and phrase structures with and without biased syntactic cues we found that the…

Scalar implicatures (SIs) lie at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and therefore have evoked great interest for language acquisition research. Many acquisition studies show that young children know the literal semantics of scalar items (like "some", "might", "start" and "or") but have…

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin interpret negative sentences with the conjunction ("he" 'and'). Our experiments test three predictions that follow from the proposal that the Mandarin conjunction is a positive polarity item (PPI) for both children and adults. On this account, the Mandarin conjunction should be interpreted…