Children'S Restrictions On The Meanings Of Novel Determiners: An Investigation Of Conservativity

Testing children's abilities to acquire novel words tells us about the word meanings that children will and won't entertain as hypotheses, and therefore about the range and limits of the word meanings permitted by the language faculty. We examine children's learning of determiner meanings, in order to investigate whether a well-established typological generalisation might derive from a con- straint on language learning. Specifically, all attested natural language determin- ers are conservative (defined below), and we compare children's abilities to learn a conservative determiner with their abilities to learn a nonconservative one. We find that children succeed in learning a novel conservative determiner but fail to learn a novel nonconservative determiner, suggesting that the typological gener- alisation is a result of constraints on children's hypothesis space of determiner meanings.