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Resumen: Este estudio toma como participantes a 13 niños (media de edad=5;07) bilingües (euskera-español) dominantes en euskera, y contrasta sus resultados con los de niños monolingües (español/euskera) y con adultos (español/euskera) a modo de control. Se empleó una tarea de evaluación de oraciones para (1) testar su conocimiento sobre el significado semántico-pragmático de los cuantificadores algunos y batzuk ‘algunos’ y para (2) comparar (i) las interpretaciones de los bilingües con las de los monolingües y (ii) las de los bilingües en sus dos lenguas. Los resultados mostraron similitudes tanto entre (i) los monolingües y los bilingües como entre (ii) las dos lenguas de los bilingües. Las similitudes entre los grupos de niños (Antoniou et al. 2013, Syrett et al. 2017) parecen obedecer al patrón del desarrollo observado interlingüísticamente (Noveck 2004, Katsos et al. 2016), más que a la (presencia o ausencia de) convergencia bilingüe en la adquisición de cuantificadores débiles. Abstract: This study takes as participants 13 Basque dominant Basque-Spanish bilingual children (mean age=5;07), and compares their results with those of Spanish/Basque monolingual children and with adults (Spanish/Basque) as controls. A sentence evaluation task was employed, in order to (1) test their knowledge about the semantic-pragmatic meaning of the quantifiers algunos and batzuk ‘some’ and to (2) compare (i) bilinguals’ interpretations with those of monolinguals, and (ii) bilinguals’ interpretations in their two languages. Results showed similarities (i) between monolinguals and bilinguals and (ii) between the two languages of bilinguals. The similarities found between the child groups (Antoniou et al. 2013, Syrett et al. 2017) seem to obey to the strong developmental pattern attested crosslinguistically (Noveck 2004, Katsos et al. 2016), rather than to the (presence or absence of) bilingual convergence in the acquisition of weak quantifiers.

Children tend to accept weak Quantifiers (Q) in contexts where strong ones hold, failing to generate Scalar Implicatures (SI) (Noveck, 2001/2004). The interpretation of a negated sentence containing a Q requires: (i) pragmatic knowledge to derive the SI and (ii) syntactic knowledge to determine the scope of negation (Neg). Uttering any of the sentences in 1(a,b) in a context where zero students attended the talk is under-informative, because the stronger Q none should be employed in order to be as informative as possible (Grice, 1975/1989).(1) a. NOT ALL the students attended the talkb. ALL the students did NOT attend the talkThe fact that Neg occupies a different position in (1a) with respect to (1b) can have an influence on the interpretation of the sentence. While (1a) in English is interpreted by adults as ‘NOT ALL’=some, (1b) can be interpreted as ‘ALL NOT’=some or ‘ALL NOT’=none. Following the “Observation of isomorphism” (Musolino, 1998), children tend to obtain isomorphic-readings, so they are predicted to interpret ‘NOT ALL’=some and ‘ALL NOT’=none. Based on Katsos et al.’s (2012) materials, a Picture Selection Task (PST) was conducted with 5-year-old monolingual-L1Spanish (n=25) children, as well as with adult native speakers of Spanish (n=17), to test their interpretation of ‘all not’ for Spanish todos no (Q-Neg) and of ‘not all’ for no todos (Neg-Q). Participants had to select one of two pictures presented on a screen, after hearing an utterance containing Q-Neg or Neg-Q. The pictures represented a none-context (where zero of five items were in the boxes) and a some-context (where two of five items were in the boxes). Results from the PST showed that Spanish children chose the none-context for Q-Neg in 73% of cases (isomorphic-readings). For Neg-Q the results were not so homogeneous, since Spanish children chose the some-context in 55% of cases. Spanish adults chose the some-context for Neg-Q in 95% of cases, and for Q-Neg the none-context in 83% of cases. While Spanish children and adults prefer the none-reading in Q-Neg, adults’ preference for the some-reading in Neg-Q contrasts with children’s response in that condition. This response pattern raises new questions regarding children’s preference for isomorphic-readings and leads to interesting predictions for the acquisition of negated Qs in Spanish.

The important role that pragmatics plays in the acquisition of morphology has been hardly studied. In this contribution we focus on the pragmatic strategies of adult caretakers in their reactions to children's early morphological productions in three different languages (French, German, Lithuanian). The most relevant distinction proposed is that between metadiscursive and conversational reactions, i.e. between reactions on linguistic form and on content. In contrast to the latter, the former represent interruptions of the flow of interaction. The distribution of these two types of reactions provides the child with abundant direct and indirect positive and negative evidence about whether his/her preceding morphological production has been well formed or ill formed. Among these reactions, which may consist in reformulations, expansions, and others, we emphasize particularly repetitions and their pragmatic functions and show that they are partially specific to child-directed speech. A special type of young children's morphological productions are bare infinitives. In contrast to their grammar-theoretical accounts in generative studies, we follow a pragmatic approach, based on child-directed speech and caretakers’ reactions, which evidences the caretakers’ tolerance of ambiguity and thus the importance of inferential work in child-adult interactions. Despite great grammatical differences between French, German and Lithuanian, the pragmatic strategies used by caretakers are very similar in quality and quantity.