David Barner

TL;DR: Four-year-olds were shown pictures in which three out of three objects fit a description, and asked to evaluate statements that relied on context-independent alternatives or contextual alternatives, which support the hypothesis that children's difficulties with scalar implicature are due to a failure to generate relevant alternatives for specific scales.

TL;DR: It is suggested that children learning language parse words that refer to individuals as count nouns unless given morpho-syntactic and referential evidence to the contrary are acquired, in which case object-mass nouns are acquired.

TL;DR: It is concluded that the correlation between quantifier comprehension and numeral comprehension in children of this age is not attributable to the singular-plural distinction facilitating the acquisition of the word one, and that quantifiers play a more general role in highlighting the semantic function of numerals.

TL;DR: Evidence is presented that children's early interpretation of numerals does rely on scalar implicature, and it is argued that differences between numerals and quantifiers are due to differences in the availability of the respective scales of which they are members.

TL;DR: It is concluded that there is little evidence to support the hypothesis that becoming a cardinal-principle knower involves a semantic induction over all items in a child's count list.