TIEMPOS DE PROCESAMIENTO

In this subsection, children's interpretation of transitive sentences with bare plurals in subject position is considered and compared with their interpretation of universal quantifiers.

Group 8: 10. Are bears holding a honeypot? 14. Are bears holding honeypots'}

<Table 14> Rates of adult/non-adult-like responses in sentences with bare plurals. (Unit: %) Context

bare/a

Adult-like res. Non-adult res.

bare/plurals

Adult-like res. Non-adult res.

1 50 (yes) 50 62 (yes) 38 2 61 (yes) 39 50 (yes) 50 3 63 (no) 37 82 (no) 18 4 32 (yes) 68 30 (yes) 70 5 56 (yes) 44 31 (yes) 69 6 74 (no) 26 74 (no) 26

For the sentences with bare plurals, Contexts 1, 2, 4 and 5 have the positive response "yes" as the right answer, but Contexts 3 and 6 have the negative response "no" as the right answer. The children involved in this experiment still show non-adult-like responses to the above bare plural structures. As we can see in Table 14, they are still preoccupied with 'a honeypot' being left out in Context 1 and 'a honeypot' being held by 'a piglef in Context 2. The figures of non-adult-like responses in Contexts 4 and 5, 68%/70% and 44%/69% respectively, show that the children interpret the bare plural NP, bears, as quantified and give an exhaustive interpretation to it. They seem to interpret the sentence "Are bears holding a honeypot?" in Contexts 4 and 5 as "Are all the bears holding a honeypot?".

This result is discrepant with reports from previous research. For example, Philip (1995) reported that children produced significantly fewer non-adult responses

to transitive questions with two bare plural NPs (e.g. "Arc fa rm ers feeding d o n k e y sT )

than they did in response to transitive questions with a universal quantifier, and concluded that children applied the symmetrical interpretation to the questions with a universal quantifier and a transitive verb phrase. However, from the present experiment, in the case of the sentence Arg bears holding honeypots? which has two bare plural NPs, 38% non-adult-like responses for Context 1, 50% for Context 2, 70% for Context 4 and 69% for Context 5 are observed. The average rate of these four figures is 57% which is similar to that found in sentences with universal quantifiers.

4.9.4 r/i^+NPs

Even adults generally give an exhaustive interpretation to the+N Ps, treating them as quantified. This section focuses on sentences with th e+ N P s in subject position to find out how children deal with them, and compares the results with their interpretation of NPs with universal quantifiers in the same position .

4.9.4.1 77r^+NPs - a / plural NP with Transitive Verb

Group 9: 15. Are the bear5 holding a honeypot? 19. Are the bearj holding honeypots?

<Table 15> Rates of adult/non-adult-like responses in the transitive sentences with

the+N Ps

(Unit: %) Context th e N P s /a

Adult-like res. Non-adult res.

theN Ps/plurals

Adult-like res. Non-adult res.

1 53 (yes) 47 58 (yes) " AÏ

2 61 (yes) 39 47 (yes) 53

3 87 (no) 13 89 (no) 11

4 61 (no) 39 70 (no) 30

5 76 (no) 24 84 (no) 16

These sentences do not lend themselves happily to a yes/no response, especially in Contexts 4 and 5. That is, adults prefer the response "yes, but not all of them," rather than answering "no," in these contexts. However, on the assumption that adults generally give an exhaustive interpretation to the+ N P s, as mentioned above, adult­ like answers in Contexts 3, 4, 5 and 6 were deemed to be the negative response, "no," for the purposes of comparison.

The high rates of negative responses for Contexts 3, 4, 5 and 6 show that children also give an exhaustive interpretation to the+NPs, insisting that every bear in the context has to be involved in the action 'holding a honeypot.' They do not even allow 'one bear holding a bunch of flowers' in Context 5.

Here the spreading of the scope of the+N Ps is also found. The children who gave negative responses in Contexts 1 and 2, 47%/42% and 39%/53% respectively, were concerned about the honeypot being left out in the former and the honeypot being held by a piglet in the latter.

4.9.4.2 77r^+NPs - a I plural NP with Intransitive Verb and PP

Group 10: 26. Are the hdbies behind a mummy elephant? 27. Are the babies behind mummy elephants?

<Table 16> Rates of adult/non-adult-like responses in the intransitive sentences with the+NPs (Unit: %) Context theNPs / a Adult-like Non-adult theN Ps/plurals Adult-like Non-adult 1 67 (no) 33 100 (no) 0 2 83 (no) 17 86 (no) 14 3 33 (yes) m # 83 (no) 17 4 33 (yes) 67 i i 17 (yes) S3 5 50 (yes) 50 B 33 (yes) 67 6 43 (no) 57 67 (no) 33

For the sentences of Group 10, Contexts 1, 2 and 6 have the negative answer "no" as the right answer, but Contexts 3, 4 and 5 have "yes" as the right answer, assigning an exhaustive reading to the+NPs. Table 16 shows that the majority of children involved in this task gave the same exhaustive interpretation that they gave to sentences with universal quantifiers. 67% of them in Context 1 and 83% of them in Context 2 seemed to take the sentence "Are the babies behind a mummy elephant?" to mean "Are all the babies behind a mummy elephant?" They spread the scope of the definite article the to the object NP a mummy elephant of PP, interpreting the same sentence in Contexts 3, 4 and 5 as "Are the babies behind all the mummy elephants?" As we can see from the high rates of negative responses in Contexts 4 and 5, 83% and 67% respectively, to the sentence "Are the babies behind mummy elephants?," the substitution of a singular NP for the plural NPs does not make any difference to the children’s interpretation.