Establishing upper bounds in English monolingual and Heritage Spanish-English bilingual language development

ABSTRACT

Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to all) in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical entries with some. Such is the case with some in English and unos and algunos in Spanish. Indeed, Heritage Spanish-English bilinguals have been documented as diverging from monolingual children and adults in their interpretation of algunos, which is said to lexically encode this upper-bounded meaning, although early Heritage bilinguals do not demonstrate this knowledge robustly. In this article, we ask how pervasive this challenge is by (a) investigating whether the same pattern holds in English, where there are not two words for some, and (b) comparing the pragmatic process for some to other linguistic items that either invoke another pragmatic process (particularized conversational implicature) or a semantic upper bound. Our results strongly suggest that the extended process of fine-tuning of quantificational lexical entries within and across languages precedes a pragmatic comparison of alternatives, but at the same time, Heritage bilinguals demonstrate pragmatic awareness beyond generalized conversational implicatures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ While research by Siegal and colleagues (Siegal, Iozzi & Surian 2009; Siegal, Matsuo & Pond 2007) has suggested that performance by bilinguals with pragmatic implicatures may exceed that of monolinguals, reasons for questioning the strength of this claim are outlined in Syrett et al. (2017a). Briefly, they concern the choice of languages and their competing existential quantifiers, performance compared to chance level, and task design.

² We note here that there are other factors that could influence the ability of the two groups of children to calculate generalized conversational implicatures dependent on lexical meaning. The overall amount of exposure to English is, for example, one such difference. There may be others that could only be assessed through independent linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks, which we did not have the opportunity to perform with these populations.