The acquisition of quantification across languages : Some predictions

While languages may vary widely as regards which concepts they encode, learners of most (if not all) languages will be faced with the task of acquiring a basic vocabulary to talk about universal aspects of human experience, such as space, time and quantity. In this paper we focus on quantifying words like ‘all’, ‘none’ and ‘some’ whose meaning and use exhibit cross-linguistic similarities as well as differences. We report an investigation in the acquisition of quantifiers by 592 5-year-old children and 440 adults speaking one of 24 languages. The findings reveal four semantic and pragmatic factors that lead to robust patterns of similarity across languages, as well as lexical factors that lead to language- specific differences. We explore the implications about the interplay of language- wide and language-specific features in the process of acquisition, as well as the relation between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition.