{"pk":24735,"title":"The strength of a universal","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Generalizations that hold across all languages (linguistic universals) provide important insights into cognition, language, and learning. In semantics, the best-known universal is determiner conservativity: the truth of sentences like “every/most/some/no fish swim(s)” depends only on the determiner's first argument (“fish”). This rules out cross-linguistically unattested determiners (e.g., “equi fish swims” meaning ‘the fish and the swimmers are numerically equivalent' isn't conservative because both fish and swimmers matter). Zuber & Keenan (2019) propose a weakening of conservativity: determiners depend on their first OR second argument, but not both. Which constraint do learners obey? We test whether adults are able to learn novel determiners that are classically non-conservative but are conservative on the weakened view. We compare these ‘weakly conservative' cases against novel determiners that are conservative on both views and non-conservative on both views. We find that adults can learn conservative meanings, but not weakly conservative meanings, supporting the classical understanding.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Language learning; Semantics"}],"section":"Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dr372fc","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Tyler","middle_name":"","last_name":"Knowlton","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Pennsylvania","department":""},{"first_name":"John","middle_name":"","last_name":"Trueswell","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Pennsylvania","department":""},{"first_name":"Anna","middle_name":"","last_name":"Papafragou","name_suffix":"","institution":"Unversity of Pennsylvania","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24735/galley/21655/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24735/galley/14333/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24735/galley/18191/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24735/galley/21655/download/"}]}