Wide-scope Indefinites in English Child Language

Abstract

"This paper is divided as follows: in section 2 we review the acquisition literature and point out a commonality among all of the experiments discussed, namely the fact that they all are trying to access covert partitive readings of the indefinite objects. Section 3 presents an experiment with adults showing that the type of object used in target sentences may influence whether adults are able to access the partitive reading. Based on the findings of this experiment, section 3 presents two experiments on the acquisition of indefinites by children"