Ling Lunch talk: Dr Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga "On borps and glippets: the acquisition of generics" | Wed 18 May 2016

18 May 2016

Time: 9:16am
Venue: Arts One 1.28

Dr Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga

Queen Mary/University of Cambridge

"On borps and glippets: the acquisition of generics" 

(joint work with Napoleon Katsos and Linnaea Stockall)

Recent developmental work on generics (e.g. tigers have stripes) has sought to provide an answer to the puzzle of how children acquire generics in the absence of dedicated words that encode genericity. An answer provided by the generics-as-default view (Leslie 2007, Gelman 2010) is that generics are the default and innate mode of generalization. Thus, generics are argued to be easier and to be acquired earlier compared to overt quantifiers like all or some.

Several studies suggest that children’s interpretation of generics is adult-like by the age of 4. It still remains unclear though whether children know two critical dimensions of generic meaning: (a) generics tolerate exceptions (i.e. tigers have stripes is true albino tigers notwithstanding) and (b) generics are valid even in the absence of strong statistical prevalence just in case the property is noteworthy or striking in some way (i.e. sharks attack people is true even though a tiny minority of sharks do so).

In this talk I will present results from a study based on Chambers et al. 2008 that looked at how 4-5 year old children learn properties of unfamiliar kinds presented with either generic or specific statements. We measured the children’s willingness to extend the described property to a new instance even in the presence of multiple exceptions, and investigated strikingness as a licensor. Our data suggest that children’s understanding of all generics is not obviously adult-like from an early age. Further research is needed in order to evaluate how easy generics are for preschoolers.