Quantifier spreading and the question under discussion

Children often display non-adult-like behaviors when reasoning with quantifiers and logical connectives in natural language. A classic example of this is the symmetrical interpretation of universally quantified statements like “Every girl is riding an elephant”, which children often reject as false when they are used to describe a scene with, e.g., three girls each riding an elephant and a fourth elephant without a rider. We present evidence that children’s understanding of these sentences is not attributable to syntactic, semantic, or general processing limitations. Instead, in two experiments, we argue that children’s behavior stems primarily from difficulty in correctly identifying the speaker’s intended “question under discussion”, and that when this question is made contextually unambiguous, children’s judgments are almost completely adultlike.