Children's Difficulty in Interpreting Japanese Differential Comparatives

要旨

This paper introduces new experimental data in order to pin down the source of children’s difficulty in solving a comparison problem, i.e., “A boy has three apples and a girl has two apples. How many more apples does the boy have than the girl?” Even young school children wrongly answer the number of the boy’s apples, three, instead of answering the differential between the two sets of apples, namely one. By investigating Japanese-speaking children, this paper first shows that children as young as four years old can determine a differential between two sets by using either one-to-one correspondence strategies or subtraction operation. Next, it shows that children wrongly interpret a differential verbal expression like “The number of the boy’s apples has increased by two.” as “The number of the boy’s apples is two.” in the same way as a differential comparative. So, it concludes that whatever properties of the two constructions cause their non-adult-like interpretation (linguistic or cognitive), children have difficulty in mapping a numeral phrase to a differential between two sets.

主題