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, External examiner,  MIT, Associate Professor of Linguistics

Professor Jean-Remy Hochmann, 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 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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GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka)

Department Coordinator

Department of cognitive SCience

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