UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12 (2000)
Age differences in the acquisition of quantifiers: Evidence from English and Korean
HYE-KYUNG KANG
This paper reports experimental finding which shows age differences in the
acquisition of universal quantifiers. From comparable experiments of English
and Korean 4 to 7 year-old children, it was found that in both groups younger
children at the ages of 4 and 5 performed significantly better than the older
children at the ages of 6 and 7. This finding gives rise to the classic pattern
of a U-shaped developmental curve. On the view that some aspects of pragmatics
are mastered late in acquisition, later than syntactic knowledge, it is assumed
that the high rate of spreading errors by older children can be attributed to
the interference of pragmatic factors, rather than to lack of grammatical
knowledge. It is therefore argued that the errors made by younger children and
the errors made by older children have to derive from different sources: the former
are attributable to a deficiency of relevant grammatical knowledge, whereas the
latter are due to the interference of pragmatic factors, even though the
relevant grammatical knowledge is available.
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