Milica Denić & Emmanuel Chemla (2017). "Q-spreading in child language as distributive inferences". Ms. LSCP & IJN.

Full paper: pdf file (10 pages)

Abstract: Children may judge sentences such as "Every girl took an apple" as false when all relevant girls took an apple indeed but some apple was not taken. We compare this phenomenon to distributive inferences, the fact that "Every girl took an apple or a pear" implies that some girl took an apple and some took a pear. Under some current assumptions about implicatures, the child phenomenon receives a natural explanation, and it is the behavior of adults, rather than that of children, that remains to be explained.

Keywords: quantifier spreading, implicatures, distributive inferences

Additional material:

Data from Experiment 1	Exp 1 txt file
Data from Experiment 2	Exp 2 txt file
Data from Experiment 3	Exp 3 txt file
Design file (for the analyses)	csv file
Script of analysis	R file