DIGG · Determiner Interpretation in Growing Grammar: Normal and Impaired Development
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2006-01-01 → 2007-12-31
- EU contribution
- €151,394
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- IIF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - DIGG (Determiner Interpretation in Growing Grammar: Normal and Impaired Development)
The aim of the project was to understand how children acquire determiners, such as 'every', 'the', 'a', 'both' and 'some'. In theoretical semantics, three components of determiner meaning have been identified, namely truth-conditions, implicatures and presuppositions. The truth-conditions inform us whether a sentence is true or false in a context in which it is uttered and implicatures and presuppositions account for cases where adults feel a sentence to be infelicitous, rather than true or false. When someone says, for example, 'Every head of mine hurts', or 'Some of the giraffes have long necks' an adult hearer would perceive the sentences to be 'strange'. These responses arise because of the presuppositions and implicatures associated with these determiners. One of our goals, therefore, was to find out whether children would also feel these sentences to be awkward. Our most important finding was that children acquisition of presuppositions and implicatures did not reach adult competence even until after they entered school, nevertheless some presuppositions were acquired earlier than others. In theoretical semantics, it has been claimed that some presuppositions are part of the meaning of a word. Other presuppositions, on the other hand, arise because they are 'better' ways of expressing the same thing. For the above example with head, for example, a better way of describing the actual world would be to say 'My head hurts'. The existence of an alternative expression would cause the sentence with 'every' to be infelicitous. One of our findings was that children did acquire the presuppositions that were part of the meaning of the determiners earlier than the derived kind, supporting one of the semantic/pragmatic theories.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Studying the process of language acquisition in children yields important insights into what constitutes the human language capability. Furthermore, it can be fruitfully applied to diagnose language impairment in individual children (cf. Seymour, Roeper, and de Villiers 2000). We investigate how children acquire the interpretation of determiners like every", "one", and "the". In the adult language these serve as the basis for forming general statements and to express logical relationships. However, man y children even at primary school age cannot correctly answer simple questions involving these words (Inhelder & Piaget 1964, Philip 1995, Crain et al. 1998, and others). Most studies so far have focused on English. The goal of this project is to exa mine other European languages, starting with German. In German the determiners "jeder", "ein", and "der" must agree in case, number and gender with the noun, which makes it unlikely that children will treat determiners in German as adverbs (cf. Philip 1995 ). The project will investigate three main components of determiner interpretation: truth conditions, implicatures, and presuppositions. The project plans to conduct experiments on German speaking children, non-impaired and impaired, and English speaking c hildren. On-going investigation by the host institution on children with specific language impairment (GLAD study) in collaboration with Kinderklinik Lindenhof in Berlin will help the current project further advance in that dimension. Furthermore, Berlin's four public pre- and primary schools as well as several other day care centers will provide a unique setting where experiments on both native German and English speaking children can be conducted. The result from normally developing children will be compa red to those of children with Specific language impairment"
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin · BerlinCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union