Two studies used a comprehension task and an elicited production task to examine whether preschool children and adults appreciated the semantic properties of generic utterances. Findings indicated that in both tasks, 4-year-olds and adults treated generics ("bears live in caves") as distinct from both indefinites ("some") and universal quantifiers ("all"). Three-year-olds did not differentiate among generics "all" and "some." By age 4, generics emerged as a distinct semantic device. (Author/KB)