Peer reviewed
ERIC Number: EJ663343
Record Type: CIJE
Publication Date: 2002
Pages: N/A
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0012-1649
EISSN: N/A
Children's Interpretation of Generic Noun Phrases.
Hollander, Michelle A.; Gelman, Susan A.; Star, Jon
Developmental Psychology, v38 n6 p883-94 Nov 2002
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)
Descriptors: Adults, Comparative Analysis, Language Processing, Nouns, Preschool Children, Semantics
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A