WHAT DO CHILDREN KNOW ABOUT THE UNIVERSAL QUANTIFIERS ALL AND EACH

Children's comprehension of the universal quantifiers all and each was explored in a series of experiments using a picture selection task. T he first experiment examined children's ability to restrict a quantifi er to the noun phrase it modifies. The second and third experiments ex amined children's ability to associate collective, distributive, and e xhaustive representations with sentences containing universal quantifi ers. The collective representation corresponds to the ''group'' meanin g (for All the flowers are in a vase all of the flowers an in the same vase). The distributive representation implies a pairing (e.g., each flower paired with a vase for Each flower is in a vase). The exhaustiv e representation exhausts both sets (e.g., for The flowers are in the vases all the flowers are in vases and all the vases have flowers in t hem). Four- to 10-year-old children had little difficulty restricting the quantifier all to the noun it modified in a task which required th em to attend to the group feature of all. In contrast, only 9- and 10- year-olds were able to solve the task when the quantifier was each and the pictures showed entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. Ch ildren showed a preference for associating collective pictures with se ntences containing all and distributive pictures with sentences contai ning each. The results suggest that between the ages of 5 and 10 years , children's semantic representations undergo less radical changes tha n others have proposed. Instead, developmental change may occur gradua lly as children acquire linguistic cues which map onto existing semant ic representations.