Collective-Distributive Interpretations in Bilingual Spanish-English-Speaking Children

Developmental semantic research in child Italian, Spanish, and English has shown that children's knowledge of distributive interpretations does not appear adult-like until 10 or 11 years of age. Further, children's knowledge of distributive interpretations predicts their knowledge of colle...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Lingwall Odio, Anne|||0000-0003-0722-7374, Grinstead, John|||0000-0001-6667-8250
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:269750
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/269750
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.161
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Distributive
Collective
Scalar implicature
Bilingual
Pragmatics
Semantics
Descripción
Sumario:Developmental semantic research in child Italian, Spanish, and English has shown that children's knowledge of distributive interpretations does not appear adult-like until 10 or 11 years of age. Further, children's knowledge of distributive interpretations predicts their knowledge of collective interpretations. Lexical development, in these studies, predicts both their distributive and collective interpretations, while development of the inhibition component of executive function predicts children's collective interpretations, but not their distributive interpretations. In this project, we test Spanish distributive and collective interpretations in a sample of bilingual Spanish-English-speaking 1st graders and an age- matched sample of monolingual Spanish-speaking children in Mexico. We find that the bilingual children have significantly greater inhibition scores than the monolingual children. The monolingual children, in contrast, have greater lexical scores than the bilinguals. Further results show that the monolinguals have more adult-like distributive and collective interpretations than do the bilinguals and that lexical scores are predictive of distributive- collective interpretations in the combined sample, while inhibition is not. We conclude that lexicon plays a greater role in collective implicature interpretations than does inhibition.