Publications

The literature on early language acquisition (Noveck, 2004; among others) concludes that children acquire the semantic features of linguistic terms earlier than their pragmatic features. Consequently, at an early age children have difficulties to derive scalar implicatures. This chapter includes a review of several studies that analyse the semantic-pragmatic comprehension of quantifiers and of aspectual marks by 5-year-old children in Basque and Spanish. The results show that this difficulty is not due to a general deficit in the pragmatic development, but to a lack of knowledge about the alternatives and the distribution of the different quantifiers and aspect markers within their specific scale.