Quantifying Kids

Abstract

Abstract It has been known for several decades that young children have difficulties with universal sentences. In this article, I present an analysis of the main errors that have been reported in the literature. My proposal is based on an old idea, namely, that children's errors are caused by a noncanonical mapping from syntactic form to semantic representation. Previous theories based on this assumption were not entirely successful because they lacked the proper framework for dealing with quantification. In particular, they failed to recognize the importance of the distinction between weak and strong quantifiers. Everything falls into place, or so I argue, if this distinction is taken into account.