In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some profissors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Someprofissors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Recent studies on the development of pragmatics suggest that preschool children are often insensitive to such implicatures when they interpret scalar terms (Noveck 2001 for terms like might and some; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini and Meroni 2001 for or). This conclusion raises two important questions: a) are all scalar terms treated in the same way by young children?, and b) does the child's difficulty reflect a genuine inability to derive scalar implicatures or is it due to demands imposed by the experimental task on an otherwise pragmatically savvy child? Experiment 1 addresses the first question by testing a group of 30 5-year-olds and 30 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on three different scales, meriki/ oli (some/all), dio/ tris (two/three) and arxi<o / teliono (start/finish). In each case, subjects were presented with contexts which satisfy the truth conditions of the stronger (i.e. more informative) terms on each scale (i.e. all, three and finish) but were described using the weaker terms of the scales (i.e. some, two, start). We found that while adults overwhelmingly rejected these infelicitous descriptions, children almost never did so. Children also differed from adults in that thei rejection rate on the numerical scale was reliably higher than on the two other scales. In order to address question (b), we trained a group of 30 5-year-olds to detect in...

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This work investigates children’s early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., big, long), maximum standard absolute (e.g., full, straight), and minimum standard absolute (e.g., spotted, bumpy) GAs in the way that the standard of comparison is set and how it interacts with the discourse context. I then ask if adverbs enable infants to learn these differences. In a corpus analysis, I demonstrate that statistically significant patterns of adverbial modification are available to the language learner: restricted adverbs (e.g., completely) are more likely than non-restricted adverbs (e.g., very) to select for maximal GAs with bounded scales. Non-maximal GAs, which are more likely to be modified by adverbs in general, are more likely to be modified by a narrower range, predominantly composed of intensifiers (e.g., very). I then ask if language learners recruit this information when learning new adjectives. In a word learning task employing the preferential looking paradigm, I demonstrate that 30-month-olds use adverbial modifiers they are not necessarily producing to assign an interpretation to novel adjectives. Adjectives modified by completely are assigned an

number expressions (one, two, three...) have standardly been considered similar to quantifiers (some, a few, all).

Number word training 0 When is four far more than three?

I would like to thank Anna Shusterman who challenged and guided me, and without whom this project would not have been possible. Thanks to my family: Brendan Gibson, Bill Gibson, and Julia Gibson for their love, support, and constant reminders to save my work to multiple hard drives. Thanks to Kyle MacDonald, Gwynne Hunter, and Barry Finder for taking time away from their own theses to provide insight into mine. I would also like to thank my roommates, Diego Bleifuss Prados, Elise Kaye, and Jordan Brown for the friendship and balance they brought to my life during this experience. Also, thank you to the professors and students that take part in the Cognitive Science Capstone Seminar and continue to enrich my experience at Wesleyan. Finally, thanks to Lauren Feld for constant intellectual, emotional, and nutritional support. When do children first learn that the word “two ” refers to a pair? Traditional number language research suggests that children begin with the belief that “two” means a set greater than one (Wynn, 1990, 1992b). In contrast, conceptual research

How does the human brain support abstract concepts such as seven or square? Studies of nonhuman animals, of human infants, and of children and adults in diverse cultures suggest these concepts arise from a set of cognitive systems that are phylogenetically ancient, innate, and universal across humans: systems of core knowledge. Two of these systems—for tracking small numbers of objects and for assessing, comparing and combining the approximate cardinal values of sets—capture the primary information in the system of positive integers. Two other systems—for representing the shapes of small-scale forms and the distances and directions of surfaces in the large-scale navigable layout—capture the primary information in the system of Euclidean plane geometry. As children learn language and other symbol systems, they begin to combine their core numerical and geometrical representations productively, in uniquely human ways. These combinations may give rise to the first truly abstract concepts at the foundations of mathematics. For millenia, philosophers and scientists have pondered the existence, nature and origins of abstract numerical and geometrical concepts, because these concepts have striking features. First, the integers, and the figures of the Euclidean plane, are so intuitive to human adults that the systems underlying them are called “natural number ” and, by some, “natural geometry”