Search

While languages may vary widely as regards which concepts they encode, learners of most (if not all) languages will be faced with the task of acquiring a basic vocabulary to talk about universal aspects of human experience, such as space, time and quantity. In this paper we focus on quantifying words like ‘all’, ‘none’ and ‘some’ whose meaning and use exhibit cross-linguistic similarities as well as differences. We report an investigation in the acquisition of quantifiers by 592 5-year-old children and 440 adults speaking one of 24 languages. The findings reveal four semantic and pragmatic factors that lead to robust patterns of similarity across languages, as well as lexical factors that lead to language- specific differences. We explore the implications about the interplay of language- wide and language-specific features in the process of acquisition, as well as the relation between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition.

Does the development of conceptual categories depend on syntactic and lexical features of a language? As part of a larger project we studied the comprehension of the (cross-linguistic equivalent of the English) quantifiers ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘some’, ‘some…not’, and ‘most’, by 5-year-old children (n=606) and adult controls (n=441) speaking one of 24 languages, representing eleven Genera. The languages differ in terms of Concord, Lexical class (e.g. noun ‘la mayoría’ vs quantifier ‘most’), use of Partitive (‘of the’), the number of Syllables, and Quantifier-Noun Order, among others. The findings suggest a fundamentally uniform pattern of the acquisition of conceptual categories across languages, which is modulated by specific syntactic and lexical features. We discuss whether the similarities in acquisition are underlined by universal conceptual primitives.