How individuals with Down syndrome understand ambiguous quantifiers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2023/14/0009/000603Keywords:
Down syndrome, Quantifiers, Numerosity, Atypical language developmentAbstract
Individuals with Down syndrome (IDS) display difficulties in understanding quantifiers but also in dealing with small numerosities. To allow for a better understanding of what may underlie these difficulties, we examined how IDS interpret the German quantifier eine (‘a/one’). This expression is ambiguous as it can refer to the exact numerosity of ‘one’ but also serves as the indefinite determiner ‘a’. We found that IDS were able to derive a lower-bounded interpretation of eine but not yet an upper-bounded interpretation. Like typically developing children, IDS often accepted two tokens as a correct instance of eine, suggesting that IDS’s answers did not differ qualitatively from those of typically developing children but rather that ambiguities in language contribute to difficulties in how IDS interpret quantifiers.
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