AUTHOR=Panizza Daniele , Onea Edgar , Mani Nivedita 

TITLE=Early ERP Evidence for Children’s and Adult’s Sensitivity to Scalar Implicatures Triggered by Existential Quantifiers (Some)

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=12

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.657408

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.657408

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>How quickly do children and adults interpret scalar lexical items in speech processing? The current study examined interpretation of the scalar terms <italic>some</italic> vs. <italic>all</italic> in contexts where either the stronger (<italic>some</italic> = <italic>not all</italic>) or the weaker interpretation was permissible (<italic>some</italic> allows <italic>all</italic>). Children and adults showed increased negative deflections in brain activity following the word <italic>some</italic> in <italic>some</italic>-infelicitous versus <italic>some</italic>-felicitous contexts. This effect was found as early as 100 ms across central electrode sites (in children), and 300–500 ms across left frontal, fronto-central, and centro-parietal electrode sites (in children and adults). These results strongly suggest that young children (aged between 3 and 4 years) as well as adults quickly have access to the contextually appropriate interpretation of scalar terms.</p>