Quantification Without Qualification

Abstract

Abstract It is widely believed that even children as old as 4 or 5 misunderstand sentences with the universal quantifier, such as Every farmer is feeding a donkey. It is claimed that English-speaking children understand this sentence to entail that every farmer is feeding a donkey and that every donkey is being fed by a farmer. A linguistic account of the difference between children's comprehension and that of adults has recently been advanced in the literature on language acquisition within the generative framework. In this article we argue against the position that children lack knowledge of any aspect of universal quantification. We present a number of empirical and theoretical difficulties with the linguistic account of children's nonadult responses to sentences with universal quantification, and we report a series of experimental investigations of children's comprehension and production of quantificational sentences. We conclude that young children have full grammatical competence with universal quantification.