ABSTRACT
The first chapter introduced three alternative models of language acquisition and one specific phenomenon that we will use in assessing these models. The present chapter looks at downward entailment from the viewpoint of child language. First, we review previous research on children’s knowledge of linguistic phenomena related to downward entailment. The main focus of previous research on children’s knowledge of downward entailment lies in the licensing conditions and the interpretation of negative polarity items. Therefore, an additional feature must be brought into the picture before we can draw on children’s knowledge of downward entailment for the purposes set forth in Chapter 1. This phenomenon is related to the interpretation of the disjunction operator or in the scope of downward entailing operators. We present an experimental investigation of children’s interpretation of the disjunction operator or in the scope of the quantified expression None of the Ns. The relevance of the findings is threefold. First, the findings expand our understanding of children’s knowledge of polarity phenomena. In particular, they highlight children’s knowledge of one interpretive consequence of downward entailment. Second, the findings illustrate how comprehension studies can be used to tap into children’s knowledge of downward entailment by providing us with a criterion of downward entailment, which can be exploited in further experimental studies. Third, the findings allow us to introduce the role of felicity conditions in child language, which will be discussed further in Chapter 4 and 5.
