CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2026
| Author | Roszkowski, Magdalena Maria |
|---|---|
| Title | The Acquisition of Plural Expressions. How children learn to navigate the logical space in the realm of pluralities. |
| Summary | A longstanding and ever-fascinating puzzle is how children acquire language so rapidly and seemingly effortlessly, raising questions about the cognitive prerequisites that enable this process and the expectations that guide it. This dissertation investigates the acquisition of various constructions that involve plural expressions and the related notions of distributivity and cumulativity as well as homogeneity and (non-)maximality. It explores questions concerning children’s early representational capacities, the relationship between linguistic representations and conceptual development and principles that support the mapping between language and the world. Specifically, it asks how children come to form complex semantic representations, which expectations about meaning they bring to the learning task and how the acquisition of expressions that encode plurality relates to more general abilities of reasoning about multitudes. The first part examines how children acquire abstract meaning representations in the domain of pluralities and addresses some fundamental questions regarding the acquisition of functional elements. By using a structural priming paradigm we investigate whether preschool-aged children are able to represent cumulative and distributive meanings of ambiguous plural sentences, even before they have mastered the truth-conditions of distributive universal quantifiers. The findings reveal priming effects for both cumulative and distributive interpretations in the absence of overt disambiguating elements, suggesting that children may have available certain logical representations prior to showing adult-like competence with the corresponding lexical items. The second part focuses on the relationship between language and thought and explores the possibility that the conceptual repertoire relevant for quantification is available at an early age. In particular, we investigate whether already preverbal infants are able to deploy the concept of exhaustivity, a notion that may later play a role in the acquisition of universal quantifiers. We present an eye-tracking study which involves a task that allows infants to learn a rule based on the quantificational properties of scenes featuring multiple agents. The results of this inquiry are inconclusive, leaving the question open of whether the concept of exhaustivity is available preverbally. The third part studies how children navigate uncertainty in the application of linguistic expressions. We examine how preschoolers interpret definite singular and plural expressions in scenarios that involve non-maximal and heterogeneous referents through a truth-value judgment task. The findings show that children are receptive to both types of violations, indicating an early sensitivity to the vague nature of language and gaps in the extension of natural language expressions. Taken together the results provide evidence for an early ability to form complex semantic representations and to deal with the uncertainty accompanying linguistic expressions, while also pointing to potential differences between linguistic and non-linguistic representations. |
| Supervisor | Téglás, Ernő; Gergely, György |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2026/roszkowski_magdalena.pdf |
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