A pilot study of quantification in child Catalan

Since the work of Inhelder and Piaget, children have been known to interpret universal quantifiers differently from adults; in this paper we present the first experimental results on the interpretation of the universal quantifier 'tots' "all" by speakers of Catalan aged 3 to 7. We observe an early stage (ages 3 to 4) in which children incur in underexhaustive and overexhaustive errors; while the first disappear at a later stage (at age 5), overexhaustive errors persist all through the period examined. Further, cross-linguistic evidence can be adduced to show that the asymmetry between subject and object underlying this kind of errors extends beyond the empirical domain of quantifiers.