Children's understanding of verbal comparatives
Abstract
English-acquiring children before 4 years of age show a fine-grained understanding of how the meaning of 'more' interacts with the lexical semantics of nouns: if the noun expresses a concept of objects, the comparison is based on number; if it expresses a concept of substance, it is based on volume or area. Is the meaning that children have acquired sufficiently general to support parallel semantic sensitivities when 'more' combines with verbs? We probe this question with 4-5 year olds. Our expectation, based in semantic theory, is that 'more' combined with an event verb like 'jump' should be quantified by number, but with a process verb like 'walk' it should be more flexible. Our Experiment 1 tests this with adults and Experiment 2 with children. We find children's understanding to be broadly consistent with that of adults, providing initial support for an early-acquired, highly general meaning for 'more'.