Dutch Children’s Interpretation of Quantificational Determiners: Must the Universal Property of Conservativity Be Learned?

Conservativity has been proposed as a universal property of natural language determiners, so it is possible that children apply it to quantifier interpretations from a young age. Using a picture verification task and sentences using the conservative determiner al (all) and the non-conservative quantificational adverb alleen (only), we tested whether or not children interpreted quantifiers conservatively. We found evidence that children interpreted both all and only non-conservatively, leading to overwhelmingly incorrect responses for sentences with all, and overwhelmingly correct responses for only. We argue that conservativity is a principle of determiners that must be learned.