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Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) edited by Alyona Belikova, Luisa Meroni, and Mari Umeda ISBN 978-1-57473-419-5 library binding vii + 490 pages publication date: 2007 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Luisa Meroni, Andrea Gualmini, and Stephen Crain The Strength of the Universal Quantifier in Child Language 277-284 (complete pdf) Research on children's understanding of the universal quantifier every in sentences like Every boy is riding an elephant has uncovered systematic non-adult behavior in pre-school and school-age children (Crain et al. 1996, Philip 1995, Drozd and van Loosbroek 1998, a.o.). A recent proposal about children's non-adult responses, by Geurts (2004), argues that children treat the quantifier every as a weak quantifier. The present study exploited this interaction of strong determiners and the interpretation of the verb to have to evaluate Geurts' proposal about children's non-adult representation of sentences with the universal quantifier. The results show that children treat the universal quantifier every as a strong quantifier, thereby undermining the account proposed by Geurts (2004). |