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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on January 13, 2007
Journal of Semantics 2007 24(1):73-90; doi:10.1093/jos/ffl009
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

What Autism Can Reveal About Every ... not Sentences

Ira A. Noveck

Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition, Université de Lyon 1 and CNRS

Raphaële Guelminger

Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition, Université de Lyon 1 and CNRS

Nicolas Georgieff

Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive, Université de Lyon 1 and CNRS

Nelly Labruyere

Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive, Université de Lyon 1 and CNRS

Correspondence: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ira Noveck, L2C2, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, 67 Blvd. Pinel, 69675 Bron, France (email: noveck{at}isc.cnrs.fr.)


  Abstract

The sentence Every horse did not jump over the fence can be interpreted with the negation taking scope over the quantifier (i.e. not every horse jumped) or with the quantifier Every taking scope over the negation (ultimately providing the reading no horse jumped). Beginning with Musolino, Crain and Thornton (2000), much work has shown that while adults typically adopt a Not every reading in ‘2-of-3’ contexts (e.g. where 2-of-3 horses jump over a fence), children do not and often produce None readings instead. In line with suggestions from Musolino and Lidz (2003, 2006), we propose that this developmental effect relies to a great extent on pragmatic capacities. In the present work, we aim to replicate Musolino et al.'s (2000) results with 4-year-olds and adults while including verbally competent autistic participants. Syntactic skills among verbally competent autistic participants are assumed to be unimpaired while their pragmatic deficiencies have been well documented. Our results show an adult preference for the Not every reading in 2-of-3 contexts and equivocality among children and autistic participants. This is in line with the expectation that syntax makes the two readings equally available and that adults, unlike young children and autistic participants, are efficient at exploiting the context in order to come up with a single consistent reading.


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