Does “Q-Spreading” Come with Presupposition Spreading?

The goal of this study is to introduce a new type of evidence to the debate on the nature of what is known in the literature as quantifier spreading (q-spreading), also referred to as the “symmetry error”. Since the work of Inhelder and Piaget (1964), it has been known that until the age of 7–8, children’s responses are frequently different from those of adults when judging the truth-value of sentences with a universal quantifier, such as English ‘every’. The errors in question are very robust and have been replicated in a variety of languages (e.g. for Dutch in Philip and Verrips 1994, Philip & Coopmans 1995, Drozd and van Loosbroek 1999, Turkish in Freeman and Stedmon 1986, Japanese in Takahashi 1991, Sugisaki and Isobe 2001, Catalan Gavarro and Escobar 2002, French in Inhelder and Piaget 1959, etc.). The core finding is that while children seem to know the general meaning of the universal quantifier, and would correctly reject a sentence like ‘every circle is red’ if a picture shown to them contains a number of red and a number of blue circles, under a closer scrutiny their universal quantifier appears to differ in its logical properties from that of adults’. The type of sentence that has been studied the most is like that in (1). The main puzzle concerns children’s responses in so-called minimal contexts, where the context consists of a visual array containing a set of boys pulling wagons with one or two extra individuals of some type (an extra boy, an extra wagon, a girl with or without a wagon etc.). It has been demonstrated that in their judgments, children often react to the presence of an extra individual in interesting ways. Thus, children have been shown to be able to judge correctly as true the sentence in the context of a picture containing symmetrically paired sets; e.g. all of the boys are pulling a wagon and all of the wagons are being pulled by boys. At the same time, children of the same ages have been documented to produce ‘symmetry error’ responses giving a no-answer in situations when the picture contains an extra unpaired wagon (as in 2):