Acquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities (seven, most) and qualities (red, spotty) present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding not only what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning task. The results of our word-learning task with 4 year-olds indicates that a "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis correctly predicts a bias towards quantity-based interpretations when a novel word appears in the syntactic position of a determiner, but leaves open the explanation of a bias towards quality-based interpretations when the same word is presented in the syntactic position of an adjective. We develop four computational models that differentially encode how lexical, conceptual, and perceptual factors could generate the latter bias. Simulation results suggest it results from a combination of lexical bias and perceptual encoding.

Wellwood, A., A. Gagliardi, and J. Lidz. (2016). Syntactic and lexical inference in the acquisition of novel superlatives. Language Learning and Development.

read pdf | official link

No language has a determiner meaning something like 'less than half' (e.g., a fost to complement determiner most), nor does any language have a determiner meaning something like what most means, but which is non-conservative (e.g., a grfost). Like the hypothetical fost, but unlike the hypothetical grfost, every natural language determiner is "conservative"—i.e., it lives on the set denoted by its complement NP. Are these two typological gaps equally principled? We look at this question from the perspective of language acquisition, asking whether the two meanings (non-conservative or conservative 'less than half') are equally acquirable. Our experiments suggest that children are able to access the non-existent, yet conservative determiner meaning fost, but not a non-conservative counterpart like grfost.

Hunter, T., J. Lidz, A. Wellwood, and A. Conroy. (2012). Restrictions on the meanings of determiners: typological generalisations and learnability. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 19.

read pdf | official link