Cross-linguistic studies of children's comprehension of quantifiers

Abstract

A series of empirical studies of English and Turkish speaking children's comprehension of the terms more, less, fewer, same, and a ll was carried out with subjects in Turkey and America. Cross-linguistic differences were found on children 's understanding of less and fewer. Nonsense syllable controls and a study using a paraphrase of the Turkish term suggest that the observed difficulties of English speaking children on less and fewer reflect the semantic obscurity of the words themselves rather than any universal linguistic phenomenon, leading to a rejection of hypotheses framed in purely linguistic terms. Cross- linguistic similarities in children's responses to same, more and a ll suggested an interpretation in terms of script theory which permits analysis on the level of the entire discourse situation. Further exploratory studies with adult subjects support the script theory interpretation and illustrate one of the major advantages of this theoretical approach; the need to postulate separate systems for children and adults is obviated.

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