Experiments in Linguistic Meaning

In languages like French and English, modals express either possibility (e.g., "you can") or necessity (e.g., "you must"). Previous acquisition research has shown that English-speaking children have particular difficulty with necessity modals: comprehension experiments show that they tend to accept must or have-to in possibility scenarios (Noveck 2001, Özturk & Papafragou 2015, a.o.); production studies show that they use them less frequently than possibility modals, and when they do, their usage is not always adult-like (Dieuleveut et al. 2022). But the cause of this "Necessity Gap" remains debated. One challenge is that past studies have focused primarily on English, where necessity modals are much rarer than possibility modals in parental speech, which could suggest that the delay is simply due to less exposure. In this study, we demonstrate through a corpus analysis of French young children's modal use and their linguistic input, as well as experiments based on this data (following the methods of Dieuleveut et al. 2022), that the delay cannot be attributed solely to limited exposure: despite more exposure, French-speaking children experience the same difficulties with necessity modals. Furthermore, we show that these difficulties persist until children are five years old.