2 Sep
2025
2 Sep
'25
1:29 p.m.
The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis
THE ACQUISITION OF PLURAL EXPRESSIONS
How children learn to navigate the logical space in the realm of
pluralities
by
Magdalena Roszkowski
wednesday, SepteMber 10, 3 P.M. CET
Room D001 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/98601131162?pwd=20mWML3KBxeyyJr0ksgSYy00O7R5dl.1&…
Meeting ID: 986 0113 1162
Passcode: 010834
PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Ernő Téglás (CEU)
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: György Gergely (CEU)
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Natalie Sebanz, Chair, CEU
Professor Athulya
Aravind<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pBeuruUAAAAJ&hl=en…;hl=en>, External
examiner, MIT, Associate Professor of Linguistics
Professor Jean-Remy
Hochmann<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IciVLb4AAAAJ&hl=d…;hl=de>, External
examiner, CNRS researcher at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod in Lyon
*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP
here<https://forms.office.com/e/58fW2Sn2PU> to get access to the lecture hall.
ABSTRACT |A longstanding and ever-fascinating puzzle is how children acquire language so
rapidly and
seemingly effortlessly, raising questions about the cognitive prerequisites that enable
this process
and the expectations that guide it. This dissertation investigates the acquisition of
various
constructions that involve plural expressions and the related notions of distributivity
and cumulativity
as well as homogeneity and (non-)maximality. It explores questions concerning
children's early representational capacities, the relationship between linguistic
representations
and conceptual development and principles that support the mapping between language and
the world. Specifically, it asks how children come to form complex semantic
representations,
which expectations about meaning they bring to the learning task and how the acquisition
of
expressions that encode plurality relates to more general abilities of reasoning about
multitudes.
The first part examines how children acquire abstract meaning representations in the
domain of pluralities and addresses some fundamental questions regarding the acquisition
of
functional elements. By using a structural priming paradigm we investigate whether
preschoolaged
children are able to represent cumulative and distributive meanings of ambiguous plural
sentences, even before they have mastered the truth-conditions of distributive universal
quantifiers.
The findings reveal priming effects for both cumulative and distributive interpretations
in the absence of overt disambiguating elements, suggesting that children may have
available
certain logical representations prior to showing adult-like competence with the
corresponding
lexical items. The second part focuses on the relationship between language and thought
and
explores the possibility that the conceptual repertoire relevant for quantification is
available at
an early age. In particular, we investigate whether already preverbal infants are able to
deploy
the concept of exhaustivity, a notion that may later play a role in the acquisition of
universal
quantifiers. We present an eye-tracking study which involves a task that allows infants to
learn a
rule based on the quantificational properties of scenes featuring multiple agents. The
results of
this inquiry are inconclusive, leaving the question open of whether the concept of
exhaustivity
is available preverbally. The third part studies how children navigate uncertainty in the
application
of linguistic expressions. We examine how preschoolers interpret definite singular and
plural expressions in scenarios that involve non-maximal and heterogeneous referents
through
a truth-value judgment task. The findings show that children are receptive to both types
of
violations, indicating an early sensitivity to the vague nature of language and gaps in
the extension
of natural language expressions. Taken together the results provide evidence for an early
ability to form complex semantic representations and to deal with the uncertainty
accompanying
linguistic expressions, while also pointing to potential differences between linguistic
and
non-linguistic representations.
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Department Coordinator
Department of cognitive SCience
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