A crosslinguistic study of symmetrical judgments

Abstract

A longstanding puzzle in developmental linguistics is why children are more permissive than adults in assigning distributive interpretations to sentences with the universal quantifiers each, every, and all under certain experimental conditions. One well-known controversial issue in this area is children’s symmetrical judgments of universally quantified sentences. Symmetrical judgments are elicited when a child is asked to judge if a sentence including a universal quantifier describes a visual context depicting an incomplete distributive relation. The following three judgment types have been included in the set of symmetrical judgment types in the literature (examples from Kang, 2001).