Scalar Implicatures in Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties

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2019, Vol. 39(5) 479–507
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DOI: 10.1177/0142723719845181
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Shenai Hu
Xiamen University, China
Peng Zhou
Tsinghua University, China
Francesca Foppolo
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Maria Vender and Denis Delfitto

University of Verona, Italy
Abstract
This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with
reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8
months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-
year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension
of sentences with scalar items yixie ‘some’ and suoyou ‘all’. The pattern of children with
RD was similar to that of six-year-old children but differed from that of age-matched
typical readers in the comprehension of the sentences containing yixie that were
pragmatically underinformative in the context. Interestingly, many children with RD and
younger children, who accepted the sentences containing yixie that were pragmatically
underinformative, rejected the sentences containing yixie that were true in a context
supporting the literal (semantic) interpretation. These results support the view that
the computation of scalar implicatures may be impaired in children with RD, due to a
complex interplay of factors such as (at least) the lexical knowledge of the scalar term
and processing/pragmatic limitations.
Corresponding author:
Shenai Hu, Department of Foreign Language Education, Xiamen University, No. 422, Siming South Road,
Xiamen 361005, China.
Email: shenai.hu@xmu.edu.cn
480 First Language 39(5)
Keywords
Chinese some, comprehension, implicature, poor readers, pragmatic development
Growing evidence has shown that children with reading difficulties (RD) have signifi-
cant impairments in oral language (Byrne, 1981; Cantiani, Lorusso, Perego, Molteni,
& Guasti, 2015; Fiorin, 2010; Joanisse, Manis, Keating, & Seidenberg, 2000; Nation
& Snowling, 2000; Scarborough, 1991; Waltzman & Cairns, 2000; Wilsenach, 2006;
Wise, Sevcik, Morris, Lovett, & Wolf, 2007; among many others). In language com-
prehension, children with RD make more errors or take longer than age-matched typi-
cal readers in interpreting affirmative and negative sentences (Hu, Vender, Fiorin, &
Delfitto, 2018; Vender & Delfitto, 2010), passive sentences (Leikin & Assayag-
Bouskila, 2004; Reggiani, 2010) and relative clauses (Arosio, Panzeri, Molteni,
Magazù, & Guasti, 2017; Bar-Shalom, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1993; Byrne, 1981;
Casalis, Leuwers, & Hilton, 2012; Mann, Shankweiler, & Smith, 1984; Smith,
Macaruso, Shankweiler, & Crain, 1989; Stein, Cairns, & Zurif, 1984).
In a number of recent studies, children with RD also showed a delay in the area of
pragmatics (Cardillo, Garcia, Mammarella, & Cornoldi, 2018; Kasirer & Mashal, 2017;
Lam & Ho, 2014; Vender, 2017). One of the most studied pragmatic phenomena is the
derivation of a special kind of conversational inference that ensues from the use of scalar
quantifiers like some. According to the standard Gricean analysis, these are pragmatic
inferences that are derived by a hearer when a speaker utters a sentence in which a scalar
term (like some) is used, as in (1). Given that a stronger linguistic alternative to some is
available (all), and that the Gricean Maxim of Quantity exhorts cooperative speakers to
be optimally informative (Grice, 1957, 1975, 1989), the fact that a speaker utters (1)
instead of (2) induces the listener to believe that the stronger alternative (2) does not
hold. This, in turn, results in the derivation of the scalar implicature (SI) in which the
meaning of the weak quantifier some is strengthened, as in (3).
(1) John ate some of the cookies in the box.
(2) John ate all of the cookies in the box.
(3) John ate some but not all of the cookies in the box.
The derivation of SI in children with RD has been investigated in recent years, and
different scalar items such as quantifiers, connectives and aspectual verbs have been
tested (Arosio, Pagliarini, Perugini, Barbieri, & Guasti, 2016; Vender, 2009, 2017). In
fact, different studies yielded contrasting results: Vender (2017) reported that Italian dys-
lexic children (M = 9;9 [9 years and 9 months], aged 8;7–11;5) were impaired in com-
parison to controls in the interpretation of scalar items belonging to different scales,
including quantifiers (some vs. all, and most vs. all), frequency adverbs (sometimes vs.
always, and often vs. always) and connectives (or vs. and); specifically, dyslexic chil-
dren performed similarly to younger children, whereas age-matched controls performed
as accurately as adults. Conversely, Arosio et al. (2016) observed that children with RD
Hu et al. 481
(M = 9;3, aged 7;5–12;3) at a comparable age to the group tested by Vender were at ceil-
ing in comprehending the scalar quantifier some, although they tested a different scalar
term (Italian qualche instead of Italian alcuni tested by Vender 2017).
The aim of the present study is to contribute further data to this debate, in order to
deepen our understanding of how children with RD derive pragmatic inferences. Since
previous research was restricted to the two studies mentioned above, both testing Italian
(Arosio et al., 2016; Vender, 2009, 2017), we decided to investigate a typologically dif-
ferent language, i.e., Mandarin Chinese. In principle, the mechanism for derivation of
SIs in Mandarin Chinese should not differ from that of Italian with respect to the seman-
tic and pragmatic abilities involved in the computation. Interestingly, however, Katsos
et al. (2016) compared five-year-old TD children’s comprehension of quantifiers in typo-
logically different languages, including Mandarin Chinese and Italian, by means of the
same task translated across languages. A different performance with respect to the com-
prehension of the quantifier ‘some’ was revealed in five-year-old Mandarin-speaking
children as compared to Italian children of the same age.
By testing Mandarin Chinese, we aim to provide new insights into the mixed results
obtained with Italian children with RD, by evaluating them from a broader cross-linguistic
perspective. To this end, we assessed the ability to compute SIs in a group of children with
RD who spoke Mandarin Chinese, and compared them with a group of age-matched typi-
cal readers and two groups of children at the earlier stages of language development.
The article is organized as follows. We first briefly introduce the phenomenon of SI
computation as well as the previous acquisition studies concerning SI in typically devel-
oping (TD) children and children with RD. Then we present our experimental study and
offer a general discussion.
Understanding scalar implicatures: theoretical and

acquisition background
Children’s ability to derive scalar inferences has been hotly debated in recent years. This
interest is partly due to the fact that this phenomenon can shed some light on the interac-
tion between semantics and pragmatics in children (as well as in adults).
As outlined above, a SI is triggered by the use of an informationally weak term
belonging to an informational scale, whereby asserting a lower-ranking alternative impli-
cates that the higher-ranking one does not hold. This is by virtue of the fact that, if the
most informative alternative held, not using it would lead to a violation of the Maxim of
Quantity, according to which cooperative speakers make their contribution as informa-
tive as required. As we have seen, a typical trigger for SIs is the quantifier some, which
is ordered in a scale with other elements like many, most, all. These elements are ordered
in a scale based on their informational strength (Horn, 1972), and a proposition contain-
ing a logically stronger term entails a proposition containing a weaker one. In the given
scale some<many<most<all, a sentence with the stronger term (e.g., all) entails a sen-
tence with the weaker one (e.g., some); referring to the examples above, (2) entails (1).
In other words, (1) is semantically compatible with (2), but (2) is more informative than
(1), as it is true in a subset of situations in which (1) is true. As we said, (1) is generally
interpreted as in (3), because the speaker is expected to abide by the conversational max-
ims: if she intended to express the richer proposition according to which John ate all of
the cookies, she should have uttered the sentence in (2). Her choice to use (1) instead of
(2) implies that the speaker’s intended meaning of (1), if the speaker has full knowledge
of the facts, corresponds to the proposition expressed by (3).
At the theoretical level, the steps involved in the derivation of SIs require (i) the com-
putation of the basic meaning of the scalar entry, (ii) the activation of the scalar alterna-
tives and (iii) the negation of the most informative interpretation (if relevant to the
purposes of the interchange), in accordance with the Maxim of Quantity. The question of
whether and how these steps are also reflected at the processing level is controversial (cf.
Chemla & Singh, 2014a, 2014b). On the one hand, there is evidence that scalar inferences
are cognitively demanding even for adults in some tasks (e.g., Bott & Noveck, 2004; De
Neys & Schaeken, 2007), and that these additional steps in the derivation reflect in a
delayed processing in online tasks (Huang & Snedeker, 2009). On the other hand, some
authors have argued that these steps are carried out during the standard semantic deriva-
tion of the meaning of a sentence, at least in contexts that support the SI derivation, thus
not necessarily requiring additional (costly) steps that reflect in a delayed processing of
the inference (e.g., Breheny, Ferguson, & Katsos, 2013; Foppolo & Marelli, 2017).
The question whether the steps involved in the derivation of a SI are cognitively
demanding in terms of processing resources is crucial in acquisition, even more so when
facing atypical populations. One way to understand the underlying process that leads to
the ‘some but not all’ interpretation is exemplified in Foppolo, Guasti, and Chierchia
(2012), considering the quantifier some as an example. (i) At the first step, the basic
meaning of some as an existential quantifier is accessed in the lexicon. (ii) At the second
step, all is activated upon hearing some and the hearer acknowledges the fact that the
speaker could have used all, while recognizing the fact that the use of some in a circum-
stance in which all applies would be underinformative, thus violating the Maxim of
Quantity. (iii) From this, the hearer is entitled to infer that all does not apply, generating
the SI according to which some is interpreted as some but not all. Although experimental
studies have provided some evidence for these processing steps, the precise role of each
step in the derivation of SIs remains open. In particular, the way in which alternatives are
activated and recognized as relevant is still debated (for recent overviews, see Papafragou
& Skordos, 2016; Skordos & Papafragou, 2016).
A variety of studies in the acquisition literature have documented that preschool chil-
dren do not compute SIs as adeptly as adults (e.g., Foppolo et al., 2012; Katsos & Bishop,
2011; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003), while school-age children behave in an adult-like
way (e.g., Doitchinov, 2005; Guasti et al., 2005). For instance, TD Italian-speaking chil-
dren at age 5 have no problems in the comprehension of the stronger quantifier tutti ‘all’,
as in Tutti i puffi sono andati in barca ‘All the Smurfs went on a boat’, while they fail to
reject underinformative qualche ‘some’ statements, e.g., Qualche puffo è andato in barca
‘Some Smurfs went on a boat’, in a situation in which all the Smurfs went on a boat
(Foppolo et al., 2012). By contrast, Italian-speaking children at age 7 have been found to
be capable of behaving like adults in rejecting underinformative qualche ‘some’ state-
ments in the situation in which all the Smurfs went on a boat (Guasti et al., 2005).
Different hypotheses have been formulated to account for this state of affairs, and the
Hu et al. 483
debate also extends to theoretical accounts of SIs (cf. Chemla & Singh, 2014a, 2014b for
an overview).
One account, which we might dub the processing account, starts from the assumption
that the derivation of SIs is cognitively demanding, thus exceeding the children’s limited
resources (Pouscoulous, Noveck, Politzer, & Bastide, 2007). Other accounts, instead,
explain children’s difficulties by appealing to their immature pragmatic system; under
these approaches, that we might dub pragmatic, children show a delayed ability with
scalar inferences either because they are pragmatically more tolerant than adults (Katsos
& Bishop, 2011), or because they fail to recognize the contextual relevance of alterna-
tives (Skordos & Papafragou, 2016). A third account, that we might call the lexicalist
account, locates children’s difficulty with the derivation of scalar inferences in their yet
immature lexicon; according to these accounts, children fail to access or retrieve the lexi-
cal scalar alternatives, since the scale is not represented in the lexicon, or the scalar ele-
ments are not stably associated with one another in a scale yet (Barner, Brooks, & Bale,
2011; Foppolo et al., 2012; Horowitz, Schneider, & Frank, 2018; Tieu, Romoli, Zhou, &
Crain, 2016).
To date, while a large number of empirical studies converge on the fact that TD chil-
dren have difficulties with scalar inferences, a consensus has not been reached with
respect to the source of this delay. This uncertainty is compounded by the fact that experi-
mental findings from atypical populations, such as individuals with autism spectrum dis-
orders (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI), are fairly mixed, so it is unclear
how these findings might contribute to the theoretical debate (Arosio et al., 2016;
Hochstein, Bale, & Barner, 2018). As far as children with RD are concerned, the literature
is sparse and the results are varied. However, we think that testing children with RD is a
worthwhile enterprise, as it could help disentangle the different approaches to SIs, provid-
ing evidence for one of the theoretical alternatives reviewed above. The next section is
devoted to introduce the sparse literature on the computation of SIs in children with RD.
The computation of scalar implicatures in children with

reading difficulties
As anticipated in the introduction, reading disorders are only the major and most evident
manifestation of dyslexia: dyslexic individuals, indeed, can suffer from deficits affecting
both their linguistic competence and their processing abilities (McLoughlin, Leather, &
Stringer, 2002; Nicolson & Fawcett, 2008; Vender, 2017).
There is a lack of in-depth studies regarding the acquisition of SIs in children with
RD, despite the fact that pragmatics is an interesting test case for defining the areas in
which individuals with RD might lag behind their TD peers, and for rehabilitation pur-
poses. Only two recent studies have assessed it in Italian children with RD (Arosio et al.,
2016; Vender, 2017). The main goal of both studies was to explore whether children with
RD exhibited difficulties with SIs.
Vender (2017) tested 20 Italian dyslexic children (M = 9;9), comparing them with
20 age-matched children (M = 9;8) and 16 younger children (M = 6;9), by using
sentences containing the quantifier alcuni ‘some’, i.e., sentences such as Alcuni bam-
bini hanno ricevuto le caramelle ‘Some children received the candies’. A truth value
judgment task was used, with four items per condition. The results showed that 54%
of the dyslexic children and 35% of the younger TD children correctly rejected the
some-underinformative statements in which all the children received the candies,
while their age-matched control children did so 97% of the time. The author explained
these results by arguing that the computation of SIs requires the construction and
comparison of two alternative descriptions of the sentence (respectively with the exis-
tential and the universal quantifier), an operation which is remarkably demanding in
terms of cognitive costs and that exceeds the limited processing capacities of younger
and dyslexic children. However, the study only reported the group’s average responses,
without reporting each individual’s performance. Thus, the issue whether the difficul-
ties of SIs can be generalized to all the children with RD, or are only restricted to
some individuals, deserves further attention.
These results contrasted with the findings reported by Arosio et al., (2016). In that
study, 24 children with RD (M = 9;3), 24 age-matched TD children (M = 9;3) and 24
vocabulary-matched TD children (M = 8;0) were tested with intransitive sentences
containing qualche ‘some’, such as Qualche mela è nelle scatole ‘Some apples are in
the boxes’, and tutti ‘all’, such as Tutte le mele sono nelle scatole ‘All the apples are in
the boxes’. They used a shortened version of the Cavegirl and Boxes task, namely, a
binary judgment task as in Katsos, Roqueta, Estevan, and Cummins’s (2011) paper.
Each condition included three items. In the task, each sentence was combined with a
visual display including a certain number of boxes that contained the mentioned
object(s) (e.g., apples). Accuracy rates of all the groups were above 92% across condi-
tions. This result shows that children with RD had no problem with the comprehension
of the logical meaning of all and some, and that, crucially for the present purposes, they
were able to recognize the infelicity of some-underinformative statements, at the same
rate of school-aged TD children.
To summarize, contrasting results are reported in understanding the scalar quantifiers
some by children with RD: severe deficits in Vender (2017) vs. at ceiling performance in
Arosio et al. (2016). However, this contrast might be due to the different classes of exis-
tential quantifiers investigated and to important differences in the experimental designs
used in the two studies.
First of all, the two studies used different Italian quantifiers (alcuni in Vender, 2017 and
qualche in Arosio et al., 2016), a factor that could have influenced children’s perfor-
mance. The fact that children are affected by the choice of different types of scalar expres-
sions has been reported in previous studies across languages (e.g., Pouscoulous et al.,
2007 for French children’s production of French existential quantifiers quelques vs. cer-
tains ‘some’). In formal semantics, existential quantifiers such as qualche/quelques can be
differentiated from existential quantifiers such as alcuni/certains. The difference between
these two classes of quantifiers has often been interpreted as related to their capacity of
‘truly’ introducing discourse-referents in discourse, and it has been conveniently formal-
ized in Partee (1988) and especially in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory
(DRT; Kamp & Reyle, 1993), in terms of the distinction between ‘proportional’ quantifi-
ers on one side, and ‘cardinality’ quantifiers on the other side. Proportional quantifiers,
such as ogni ‘every’ in Italian, express a specific relation between the two sets correspond-
ing to the nominal restriction of the quantifier and to the predicative restriction. For
instance, in a sentence such as Every Italian is blonde, the quantifier every encodes a
Hu et al. 485
specific relation between set A (the set of the Italians) and set B (the set of blonde people).
Crucially, no independent set is introduced here as a discourse-referent, since A and B are
bound by the quantifier. Moreover, there is no way to interpret every (i.e., the quantifier)
as expressing an intersective property of A and B: what every expresses is simply that A is
included in B, without reference to any independent property of the A’s that are B’s. The
same holds for a quantifier like most. What matters to us here is that existential quantifiers
such as qualche/quelques can also be interpreted as proportional quantifiers. A sentence
such as Some Italians are blonde is accordingly interpreted as simply expressing a relation
between A (the set of Italians) and B (the set of blonde people). However, notice that with
existential quantifiers, the property expressed by the quantifier could also be expressed as
a ‘cardinal’ property of the A’s that are B’s: the set of blonde Italians has at least cardinal-
ity one. In this way, a discourse-referent is plausibly introduced (as the intersection of A
and B) and the quantifier can be viewed as a cardinal property predicated on this referent
(i.e. the class of blonde Italians contains at least one individual). Quantifiers that exhibit
this behavior are ‘cardinality’ quantifiers. As discussed in Kamp and Reyle (1993, pp.
452–461), quantifiers such as many sometimes behave as a proportional and sometimes
as a cardinality quantifier. In some cases, whether the sentence is true seems to depend
only on the nominal restriction of many: the sentence Many inhabitants of this town are
Mexican is more promptly judged as true than the sentence Many Mexicans live in this
town. This suggests that many behaves proportionally, since it is sensitive only to A and
not to the intersection between A and B. However, in a context where 10% of the houses
in our street are insured and exactly those houses burned down, it is certainly less accept-
able to state that Many houses in our street were insured than stating that Many houses in
our street burned down. In this case, whether the use of many is felicitous seems to depend
on the intersection between A and B.
On these grounds, one might ask whether a given existential quantifier, in a particular
language, is interpreted as a proportional or as a cardinality quantifier. When an existen-
tial quantifier Q is cardinal, a discourse-referent is introduced (corresponding to the set
of the A’s that are B’s) and the cardinal property expressed by Q is then predicated on this
discourse-referent. From this perspective, as already mentioned above, the existential
quantifier qualche plausibly qualifies as proportional in Italian: given the sentence
Qualche ospite è arrivato ‘Some guests arrived’, pronominal anaphora remains marginal
both with a singular and a plural pronoun (??È nell’atrio ‘He is in the hall’ and ??Sono
nell’atrio ‘They are in the hall’), suggesting that there is no set counting as an independ-
ent discourse-referent. Conversely, the existential quantifier alcuni is arguably cardinal.
It promptly warrants pronominal anaphora (Alcuni ospiti sono arrivati. Sono nell’atrio.
‘Some guests arrived. They are in the hall.’) and its felicity seems to be sensitive to the
properties of the intersection between A and B. Take for instance a situation in which
20% of the Mexican population is both blonde and sick: it is plausibly more felicitous to
utter the sentence Alcuni messicani sono biondi ‘Some Mexicans are blonde’ than to utter
the sentence Alcuni messicani sono malati ‘Some Mexicans are sick’ (in the latter case,
it is certainly more accurate to say that many Mexicans are sick). Alcuni qualifies thus
arguably as a ‘cardinality’ quantifier.
Now, it is quite reasonable to argue that cardinality quantifiers might involve more
complex processing than proportional quantifiers. For instance, while calculating the
relevant SI associated with the last sentence, an Italian speaker needs: (i) to introduce the
set of sick Mexicans as a discourse-referent, (ii) to be endowed with the piece of lexical
knowledge according to which alcuni expresses a well-defined cardinal property of this
set (i.e., the set has at least cardinality one), and (iii) to exclude the informationally richer
alternatives. Conversely, an Italian speaker who calculates the SI with the proportional
quantifier qualche only needs to know which relation is expressed by qualche and to
compare it with informationally richer relations along the relevant scale (many, most,
all). Clearly, it might well be the case that learning these two classes of quantifiers is not
a unique undifferentiated process, and that this might contribute to explain the children’s
different behavior with qualche (a proportional quantifier) and alcuni (a cardinality
quantifier), both when they have to assess the semantic value of a sentence containing an
existential quantifier and when they have to derive its pragmatic meaning by calculating
a SI. In fact, we propose that the difference between proportional existential quantifiers
and cardinality existential quantifiers is what explains the different results obtained by
Arosio et al. (2016) and Vender (2017) with, respectively, qualche and alcuni. Similarly,
we will argue below that the different results obtained with different classes of existential
quantifiers in Mandarin Chinese are arguably related to the very same difference.
Of course, we should also emphasize that the two studies used verbs of different cat-
egories, i.e., transitive verbs in Vender (2017) and intransitive verbs in Arosio et al.
(2016), which might lead to different experimental demands. We know from previous
studies that children’s performance with SIs varies tremendously across different experi-
mental tasks, and that children are sensitive to training and task manipulations (Foppolo
et al., 2012; Guasti et al., 2005; Katsos & Bishop, 2011; Noveck, 2000; Papafragou &
Musolino, 2003; among many others). Even in adults, there is considerable variation
across scales among the rates at which scalar expressions give rise to upper-bounding
inferences (van Tiel, van Miltenburg, Zevakhina, & Geurts, 2016).
As we said, testing a language typologically different from Italian is crucial for an
independent assessment of the competence with the pragmatic meanings of scalar terms
in children with RD and, eventually, to better explain the conflicting results obtained in
Italian. All the more so when considering that, first of all, Mandarin Chinese displays
two variants of ‘some’, as briefly outlined in the next section and, secondly, Mandarin-
speaking children showed a non-adult-like comprehension of this scalar term even when
no inference was required, as attested by the cross-linguistic investigation by Katsos
et al. (2016). In this way, we also hope to be able to tease apart children’s knowledge and
understanding of scalar quantifiers from the processing abilities required to derive a
scalar inference.
‘Some’ in Mandarin Chinese

Our study was conducted in Mandarin Chinese. In this language, there are two scalar
items which are roughly equivalent in meaning to English some: yixie and youxie, as
exemplified in (4–5).
(4) Yixie ren na le pingguo.

one-some person take ASP apple
Some people took an apple.
Hu et al. 487
(5) Youxie ren na le pingguo.

have-some person take ASP apple
Interpretation 1: Some people took an apple.
Interpretation 2: There were some people who took an apple.
Although yixie and youxie are often treated equally as English some (Politzer-Ahles,
Fiorentino, Jiang, & Zhou, 2013; Tsai, 2004; Wu & Tan, 2009; Zhao, 2012), syntactically
and semantically they are not equivalent to each other. According to Tsai (2003, 2004),
you ‘have’ can be analyzed as a determiner, occupying a D position, while yi ‘one’ is a
numeral, occupying a Num position (from Tsai 2003, p. 5). The tree diagrams of youyixie,
youxie and yixie are illustrated in (6a, b, c), respectively.
(6) a.
b.
c.
Youxie is considered to be equal to youyixie when the numeral yi ‘one’ is omitted. On

these morphosyntactic grounds, it is reasonable to propose that yixie (whereby a numeral
composes with a noun) qualifies as a cardinality quantifier (such as alcuni in Italian),
whereas youxie (where only the determiner-like element is overtly realized) qualifies as a
proportional quantifier (such as qualche in Italian). In a nutshell, we propose that (5) is
interpreted as true whenever a certain relation holds between the two relevant sets (the set
of people and the set of those who took an apple), whereas (4) is interpreted as true when-
ever the discourse-referent that is introduced (the set of people who took an apple) satis-
fies the cardinality property expressed by yixie (this set contains at least one element).
Regarding the syntax/semantics interface, there are certainly other properties that
should be explored. For instance, it is generally cardinality quantifiers that give rise to
there-be constructions. However, in Mandarin Chinese it is the proportional quantifier
youxie that gives rise to a construction roughly equivalent to an English there-sentence,
as illustrated in Interpretation 2 of (5). Here, we will put these complications aside, espe-
cially because they are plausibly related to a set of distinct syntactic properties of the
Chinese existential quantifiers that are not shared by English. For instance, as far as their
syntactic positions are concerned, an asymmetry occurs with youxie, but not with yixie.
That is, youxie can only occur in the subject position, whereas yixie can appear either in
the subject position or in the object position, as in (7).
(7) Zhang San na le yixie/*youxie pingguo.

Zhang San take ASP some apple
Zhang San took some apples.
In particular, what we intend to emphasize here is that, given these syntactic and
semantic differences between the two scalar items youxie and yixie, we might expect
children to exhibit different patterns when acquiring the two scalar items, on the model
of what we proposed for Italian above. The question is whether this prediction is borne
out or not.
As far as we are aware, some experimental studies on the acquisition of youxie ‘some’
have been carried out, while the acquisition of yixie ‘some’ has not yet been explored. Su
and Su (2015) tested the comprehension of sentences containing youxie ‘some’ with a
group of TD children (N = 16, M = 6;6, SD = 1.6) and a group of young children with
ASD (N = 14, M = 6;6, SD = 1.6). The data showed that the TD children accepted logi-
cal interpretations (i.e., they accepted the sentences in the some-underinformative condi-
tion) 21% of the time, and that the children with ASD did so 36% of the time, but no
significant difference was found between the two groups. Regarding the some-true and the
some-false conditions, both groups provided high proportions of correct judgments (above
93%). The results confirmed the findings from the aforementioned cross-linguistic stud-
ies: namely, some young children have difficulties in deriving the pragmatic inference of
some. However, even young children appear to perfectly master the semantic meaning of
the existential quantifier, as revealed by their virtually ceiling performance in the some-
true and some-false conditions, where no inferential process was involved.
In addition, Katsos et al. (2016) tested the comprehension of sentences containing
youyixie ‘some’ by TD Mandarin-speaking children (N = 34, M = 5;5, aged 5;0–5;11),
Hu et al. 489
using the Cavegirl and Boxes task (Katsos et al., 2011). This existential quantifier is
morphologically more complex than youxie, since it overtly features not only the deter-
miner you but also the numeral element yi. We propose that this morphological complex-
ity is mirrored by semantics; in fact, the presence of the numeral yi suggests that the
interpretation of youyixie involves a process of intersective reduction, at the end of which
the cardinality quantifier is interpreted as the property of a free discourse-referent. In
other words, youyixie is a cardinality quantifier, on a par with yixie. The data provided by
Katsos et al. (2016) showed that the children provided target responses in the some-
underinformative condition (i.e., they rejected underinformative statements) 33.8% of
the time, in the some-true condition 63.7% of the time, and in the some-false condition
77.5% of the time. Apart from children’s behavior in the some-underinformative condi-
tion, where children performed far worse than with youxie, these results are also interest-
ing in another respect: namely, Mandarin-speaking children made lots of errors in the
some-true and some-false conditions. This finding was robust in Mandarin Chinese, but
it is at odds with other findings regarding Indo-European languages in which children’s
performance on some-true and some-false statements is typically at ceiling. However,
these results are arguably no longer so puzzling if one considers not only that youyixie,
as a cardinality quantifier, should be generally harder to master, as suggested by our
discussion above, but also that the degree of morphological complexity of this quantifier
has been taken to correspond to an interpretive process according to which the propor-
tional interpretation of the quantifier gets reinterpreted in terms of the cardinal property
of a discourse-referent. In these conditions, we predict in fact that it is not only the prag-
matic reading that becomes more complex, but that lexical knowledge itself involves a
complex semantic process, which consists in identifying an intersective set as the dis-
course referent and in predicating a specific cardinality property (i.e., the set contains at
least one element) of this discourse-referent. This is exactly the kind of difficulty that
emerges from Katsos et al.’s data. As we will see, these results are fully confirmed by
those of our experiment, to be discussed below.
Given these previous studies on Mandarin-speaking children, in our study we decided
to investigate yixie ‘some’. Based on the discussion above, and on the fact that yixie only
features a numeral in addition to the classifier, we think that it is reasonable to propose
that yixie is a cardinality quantifier.
The current study

In the present study, we investigate the comprehension of sentences containing yixie
‘some’. As shown above, cross-linguistic studies have shown that children seem to
respond differently to different scalar items, and it would be interesting to see whether
Chinese children also have difficulties in deriving the pragmatic inference of yixie ‘some’.
Previous studies on adults’ processing reported that the interpretation of yixie ‘some’ is
costly and effortful (Chen & Guo, 2012; Zhao, 2012). For instance, Zhao (2012) reported
that adults took longer to interpret sentences such as Yixie nühai you bianzi ‘Some girls
have their hair in braids’ pragmatically, than to interpret them logically (cf. also Bott &
Noveck, 2004 for related findings in French). Given this result, we might expect children
to display some difficulty in interpreting yixie ‘some’ pragmatically.
In addition, previous results on youyixie ‘some’ showed, as discussed above, that

young children made many errors in the some-true and some-false conditions, a situation
not attested in many other languages (Katsos et al., 2016). It would be interesting to see
whether Chinese children also make errors in the some-true and some-false conditions
when comprehending sentences containing yixie ‘some’.
All in all, the present study has a threefold objective. First, we aim to investigate the
comprehension of the scalar quantifiers yixie ‘some’ and suoyou ‘all’ in Chinese children
with RD, and to test their ability to interpret yixie ‘some’ pragmatically. This would allow
us to assess the children’s knowledge of the scalar quantifiers in the first place, and their
competence with SIs. Second, our participants included two groups of younger children
in order to investigate how children develop their knowledge of the scalar quantifiers
involved in the scale over time, as well as their ability to derive SIs, by looking at their
errors in different conditions. Third, we attempt to explore whether there are similarities
between children with RD and children at the earlier stages of language development: on
the basis of the literature reviewed above (Vender, 2017), we predict that children with
RD exhibit significant limitations in the interpretation of sentences requiring complex
processing and/or pragmatic analysis, performing similarly to younger TD children.
Method
Participants
Eighty-four children participated in the experiment, including a group of 24 poor readers,
a group of 20 typical readers of the same chronological age, a group of 20 six-year-old
children and a group of 20 five-year-old children. They were recruited in Zhejiang and
Fujian, China, and the medium of instruction at schools was Mandarin Chinese. In addi-
tion, we tested 20 adult controls aged 19;0–21;11, all native speakers of Mandarin Chinese.
The reading skills of children in the poor reader and typical reader groups were
assessed using a literacy test which has been used in prior research (Hu et al., 2018).
Children were placed in the poor reader group if their scores on the literacy test were
at least 1.5 SD below the average mean for their grade, and if they had difficulties in
reading and writing Chinese according to daily observations in their teachers’ reports.
They were also assessed on the Chinese version of the combined Raven’s Progressive
Matrices test (Zhang & Wang, 1985), obtaining a standardized score equal to or above
80; two poor readers were excluded from the initial sample of 24 participants, due to a
score below 80. Moreover, they were tested for phonological awareness and morpho-
logical awareness, which have been claimed to be essential for learning Chinese
(McBride & Wang, 2015). Phonological awareness was assessed with onset detection,
rhyme detection and tone detection tests, and morphological awareness was assessed
with homophone awareness and homograph awareness tests (Hu et al., 2018). A sum-
mary of the children’s descriptive characteristics is presented in Table 1. One-way
ANOVAs revealed no differences between the poor readers and the typical readers
regarding age, F(1, 40) = .33, p = .57, and the Raven scores, F(1, 40) = 2.08, p = .16,
while one-way ANOVAs revealed significant differences between two groups in liter-
acy, F(1, 40) = 21.64, p < .001, phonological awareness F(1, 40) = 10.67, p < .01,
and morphological awareness, F(1, 40) = 12.04, p < .01.
Hu et al. 491
Table 1. Participant characteristics.
Poor readers Typical readers TD age 6 TD age 5

Number 22 20 20 20
Gender/boys 17 boys 9 boys 10 boys 12 boys
Age/years 9;8 (1.16) 9;10 (1.03) 6;5 (0.31) 5;6 (0.24)
Raven IQ 100.54 (11.88) 105.70 (11.21) – –
Literacy 0.65 (0.16) 0.83 (0.07) – –
Phonological awareness 0.58 (0.22) 0.78 (0.17) – –
Morphological awareness 0.56 (0.19) 0.73 (0.13) – –
Note. For age, the numbers are mean years for each group, e.g., 9;8 means 9 years and 8 months; for the
Raven IQ, the numbers are mean of standardized scores for each group; for literacy, phonological aware-
ness and morphological awareness, the numbers are mean of accuracy for each group.
None of the children tested had any report of brain damage, sensory impairments, or
serious emotional or behavioral problems. Their vision was normal or corrected to
normal.
Materials
The experiment involved five conditions: sentences containing yixie ‘some’ that were
true, false, or pragmatically underinformative in a context; sentences containing suoyou
‘all’ that were logically true or false within a context. Examples of yixie ‘some’ and
suoyou ‘all’ are given in (8–9).
(8) Yixie nühai na le pingguo.

some girl take ASP apple
Some girls took an apple.
(9) Suoyou nühai na le pingguo.

all girl take ASP apple
All girls took an apple.
The test comprised 20 items, eight of which were in the some-underinformative con-
dition. In addition, there were four warm-up items. Each item was combined with the
different types of object in order to avoid any effects from previous mention of a quanti-
fier and object combination. A full list of experimental items is given in the Appendix 1.
The task administered was a PowerPoint version of the truth value judgment task (Crain
& Thornton, 1998). Similar to the prior work by Su and Su (2015) and Vender (2017), the
stories were presented by one experimenter, using Microsoft PowerPoint on a laptop. Before
the experiment started, the experimenter introduced a group of characters to participants,
including a puppet (a small bear), five girls and five boys. The participants were invited to
listen to stories and look at a number of visual displays showing the characters performing
some actions. Here is an example of how the experimenter introduced the story: ‘In this
scenario, there are five girls and five apples. The first girl took an apple. The second girl
took an apple. The third girl took an apple. The fourth girl took an apple. The fifth girl took
an apple’ (for a sample of the visual stimuli, see Figure A1 in Appendix 2). At the end of the
action, the small bear gave a statement on what he saw and then the participants had to judge
the accuracy of the puppet’s description. In the example provided, the small bear could
describe the situation as ‘All/Some girls took an apple’. This sentence could be uttered in
different situations, as exemplified in Figure 1, that made it true, false or, in the case of some,
underinformative. If participants rejected a statement, they were invited to explain why they
judged it wrong. This question was asked to check whether they rejected the statement for
reasons unrelated to falsity or informativeness (Katsos et al., 2011).
Procedure
All the children were tested in their school during school-time, and the tasks were admin-
istered in three sessions: in the first two sessions, which lasted roughly 20–30 minutes
each, we administered the preliminary measures reported in the Participants section. In
the third session, which was about 15–30 minutes, we administered the task with SIs.
Results
The percentages of target responses in each condition for each age group are provided
in Table 2. It is evident that there is some variation across the groups. Specifically, the
poor readers rejected the sentences in the some-underinformative condition 73% of the
time, while the age-matched typical readers did so 100% of the time, as expected given
their age; moreover, the six-year-old children and the five-year-old children rejected
them 55% and 30% of the time, respectively. With respect to the some-true condition,
the poor readers, the six-year-old children and the five-year-old children only accepted
the truth-conditionally correct statements 79%, 60% and 40% of the time, respectively,
while typical readers never rejected them, as expected. On some-false, all-true and all-
false conditions, all participants responded correctly above 95% of the time. Adults
performed at ceiling in all the conditions. Thus, we did not include adults’ data for fur-
ther analyses.
To better understand the pattern of children’s responses, we further inspected chil-
dren’s responses in the two conditions in which they showed a more variable perfor-
mance. With respect to the some-underinformative condition, one first observation is that
children were consistent in their strategy and were bimodally distributed, as already
observed in previous studies (Guasti et al., 2005): 27% (6 out of 22) poor readers, 45%
(9 out of 20) six-year-old children and 65% (13 out of 20) five-year-old children accepted
all the critical underinformative statements, therefore always avoiding the computation
of the implicature. Only one five-year-old child showed an inconsistent behavior, accept-
ing 3 of the 8 some-underinformative items, and rejecting the others. By contrast, none
of the age-matched typical readers accepted the underinformative statements (Figure 2).
Regarding children’s rejection of some-underinformative statements, they were asked to
provide an appropriate correction: all children responded appropriately by invoking the
strong quantifier all, e.g., by saying that since all girls took an apple, ‘some girls took an
apple’ was a bad description of the story, indicating that they were rejecting the underin-
formative statements for the correct reason. With respect to the some-true condition, 23%
Hu et al. 493
(1) some-underinformative condition

Some girls took an apple.
says: “Some girls took an apple.”
(2) some-true condition

Some girls took a banana.
says: “Some girls took a anana.”
(3) some-false condition

Some girls took a rose.
says: “Some girls took a rose.”
Figure 1. (Continued)
Figure 1. Examples of final outcomes displayed on screen in each condition.
Table 2. Percentage (%) of target responses across conditions and groups, with standard
deviation in parentheses.

some-underinformative 73 (46) 100 (0) 55 (51) 30 (47)
some-true 79 (41) 100 (0) 60 (50) 40 (50)
some-false 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0) 98 (7)
all-true 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0)
all-false 100 (0) 100 (0) 98 (7) 95 (22)
Hu et al. 495
Figure 2. Children’s target (pragmatic) responses in the some-underinformative condition

across groups.
(5 out of 22) poor readers, 40% (8 out of 20) six-year-old children and 60% (12 out of
20) five-year-old children consistently rejected the statements (at least 2 out of 3 times),
while all the typical readers consistently accepted it.
Following Skordos and Papafragou (2016), we categorized participants according to
their performance on each trial type as either Passers (if they scored 0.75 or greater), or
Failers (if they scored 0.50 or less). Children that provided inconsistent answers were
excluded (this was the case of one five-year-old child). Indeed, children were highly
consistent and almost all provided the same type of response across items of the same
condition. We thus conducted nonparametric statistics on the data, adopting the
Bonferroni correction to adjust p-values for multiple comparisons when appropriate.
Two separate Fisher’s Exact Tests on 2 × 4 contingency tables revealed a signifi-
cant difference between the number of children that consistently rejected the some-
underinformative statements and accepted the some-true statements in the four groups
(both ps < .001).
We further explored these results by running separate Fisher’s Exact Tests on 2 × 2
contingency tables comparing the number of children who consistently provided a cor-
rect or pragmatic response (i.e., accepting the some-true statements and rejecting the
some-underinformative statements) with the number of children that consistently failed
to do so across groups. We found a statistically significant difference between the poor
and the typical readers in the rate of derivation of SI (p = .0432), but not in the rate of
correct responses in the some-true condition (p = .217); no significant difference was
revealed between the poor readers and the six-year-old children in both conditions (both
ps < .01); significant differences were observed between the poor readers and the five-
year-old children in both conditions (both ps < .05). By comparing the six-year-old
children with the other groups, a significant difference was only revealed with the typical
readers in both conditions (both ps < .01), but not between the six-year-old and the five-
year-old children (both ps > .05).
The results in the some-underinformative condition reflect children’s difficulty with
the derivation of SI at younger ages, as already attested in previous studies (e.g.
Foppolo et al., 2012); also, it shows that the poor readers, albeit older, still accepted
logical interpretations, patterning like the six-year-old children and, crucially, differ-
ently from their TD peers.
The finding about children’s rejection of some-true statements, albeit surprising if
compared with the findings in other languages, is in line with what was previously found
by Katsos et al. (2016) on Mandarin Chinese. One possibility to explain this result,
already discussed in the literature, is that children expected a numeral to be used in this
case (Degen & Tanenhaus, 2016; Foppolo et al., 2012), and this might have offered
grounds for rejection. However, we can rule out this possibility, based on children’s jus-
tifications. Interestingly, they always justified their rejection by saying that ‘some girls
took an apple’ was a bad description of the story because some girls included all five
girls, and in the relevant scenario only three girls took an apple, while the other two girls
did not take an apple. What is going on is thus not simply the fact that children expected
‘three’ instead of ‘some’. As their justifications clearly indicate, children seem to be able
to identify the discourse-referent in the relevant scenario, i.e., the set of girls who took an
apple (corresponding to A∩B), but are arguably not able to apply the correct cardinality
property to this set (the set must contain at least one element). It is as if they identify the
discourse-referent (the girls who took an apple) and are led to interpret it universally (as
the obvious default option), since they cannot calculate the predicative limitation that
comes with it. This is exactly the kind of difficulty that we may expect under the hypoth-
esis that a sentence containing a cardinality existential quantifier is true if and only if the
discourse-referent corresponding to the intersective set (the girls who took the apple)
satisfies the cardinal property of containing at least one element. It is also important to
bear in mind that this kind of error was found only in younger children, and that it was
not so common in the poor readers, who correctly interpreted the quantifier in the major-
ity of the cases (79%).
As pointed out by one of the reviewers, another possible explanation for this behavior
is more methodological and pertains to the material presented in this condition: in the
relevant scenario, three girls took an apple and the other remaining two girls did not take
anything. This might have created an (unfulfilled) expectation that the other girls were
taking, for example, another kind of fruit, generating some possible confusion in some of
the poor readers and the younger children (cf. also Crain & Thornton, 1998 for a discus-
sion about the felicity conditions in the truth value judgment task).
To further inquire into the responses of younger and RD children, we checked
whether there is an overlap between children who accepted statements in the some-
underinformative condition and those who rejected statements in the some-true condi-
tion. Indeed, 4 out of the 5 poor readers, 7 out of the 8 six-year-old children and 11 out
of the 12 five-year-old children that rejected some-true actually accepted some-under-
informative as well, thus signaling a strong relation between the knowledge of the
basic meaning of the scalar term, and the derivation of its strengthened meaning. What
Hu et al. 497
Table 3. Percentage (%) of target responses across conditions and groups, with exclusion of
children who did not respond to the some-true condition correctly, with standard deviation in
parentheses.

some-underinformative 94 (24) 100 (0) 83 (39) 71 (46)
some-true 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0)
some-false 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0)
all-true 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0)
all-false 100 (0) 100 (0) 100 (0) 88 (33)
this suggests is that one of the main sources of difficulty in the some-underinformative
condition is that children cannot activate the some/all scale with cardinality quantifi-
ers, since children are still not able to master the piece of lexical/semantic knowledge
required to interpret the cardinality quantifier as a specific property of the intersective
discourse-referent.
In order to better understand children’s performance on the some-underinformative
condition, we analyzed the data by excluding those children who consistently rejected
the statements in the some-true condition; namely, we used the some-true condition as an
exclusion criterion. The remaining children included 17 poor readers, 12 six-year-old
children, 7 five-year-old children and 20 typical readers. As shown in Table 3, the remain-
ing group of poor readers, the six-year-old children and the five-year-old children
rejected the sentences in the some-underinformative condition 94%, 83% and 71% of the
time, respectively.
A Fisher’s Exact Test on a 2 × 4 contingency table revealed a significant difference
between the number of children that consistently rejected the some-underinformative
statements in the four groups (p = .0383). This effect was further explored by running
separate Fisher’s Exact Tests on 2 × 2 contingency tables comparing each group to each
other. By adopting the above-mentioned exclusion criterion, no difference was revealed
in any of the comparisons (all ps > .05), except for a marginal difference between the
five-year-old children and the typical readers (p = .0598).
To sum up, there were three main findings. First, the pattern of the poor readers was
similar to that of the six-year-old children but differed from that of age-matched typical
readers in the some-underinformative condition when all children were included in the
pairwise comparisons. Second, some poor readers and some younger children did not
accept the sentences in the some-true condition. By excluding these children, the pattern
of the poor readers did not differ from that of the age-matched typical readers in the
some-underinformative condition, suggesting that the delay observed in the previous
comparison might be (also) due to some difficulty with the lexical knowledge of the
scalar term involved in the computation. Third, there was an improvement from age 5 to
age 6 both in the some-underinformative and the some-true conditions, which were found
to be particularly problematic for the younger children. Interestingly, there was a signifi-
cant overlap between the some-underinformative and the some-true conditions in the
poor readers, the six-year-old and the five-year-old groups: many children who accepted
‘some’ in the some-underinformative condition also rejected ‘some’ in the some-true

condition.
Discussion
Our study shows that some children with RD exhibit deficits in the comprehension of the
scalar quantifier yixie ‘some’ and in the derivation of the SI associated with it. In fact, as
shown by the individual analysis, 6 out of 22 children with RD consistently accepted the
critical underinformative statements, while none of the typical readers of the same age
accepted them. This indicates that (at least some) children with RD have problems with
some of the steps involved in the calculation of SIs. These results are compatible with
Vender’s (2017) findings, since they provide a confirmation that some poor readers
exhibit serious deficits in the computation of SIs. Our results are also consistent with the
findings from previous studies on adults with dyslexia (Griffiths, 2007), demonstrating a
possible correlation between dyslexia and non-pragmatic readings of scalar terms.
Although it is not surprising that, overall, children with RD perform differently from
their TD peers, we want to focus on two interesting patterns observed in our data.
First, by comparing poor readers with TD children at an age that has been found to be
crucial for pragmatic development, namely age 5 and 6, we found that the children with RD
pattern alike to the TD children at age 6 and perform better than the younger children.
Second, we found a systematic correspondence between the failure to accept some in a
condition in which it was appropriate to describe a subset situation, and the acceptance of
some in a condition in which it was infelicitously used to describe a superset situation. All
the children, however, correctly rejected some when it was used to describe a situation in
which the set was empty (i.e., in some-false condition). We think that these results, all
together, are quite interesting in light of the different hypotheses proposed to explain chil-
dren’s failure. As outlined in the introduction, one possibility is that the children that fail
with SIs might not have acquired the meaning of some yet, and that this fact might lead to
problems in retrieving the lexical alternative all within a lexicalized scale, a proposal com-
patible with lexicalist accounts (Barner et al., 2011; Foppolo et al., 2012). As we have seen,
this hypothesis can be fleshed out in an interesting and precise way. When the existential
quantifier is a cardinality quantifier, it can be argued that what is at stake semantically is not
simply the relation between two sets; rather, the process of semantic interpretation involves
two distinct phases: the first consisting in the identification of an intersective discourse-
referent and the second consisting in the attribution of the cardinal property expressed by
the quantifier to this discourse-referent. If children, at a certain phase of development, get
stuck after the first phase, we predict in fact that (i) they will resort to the universal reading
of the discourse-referent as a default option, and (ii) they will not be able to activate the
some/all scale in the computation of the SI. Arguably, this is exactly what we found: a
subset of our Chinese children interpreted yixie ‘some’ as all and had difficulty calculating
the pragmatic reading in the some-underinformative condition.
Of course, this kind of difficulty might be compounded by other independent factors.
For instance, some children might be more tolerant or less capable of recognizing contex-
tual relevance, which is compatible with a general pragmatic delay in pragmatic compe-
tence. Moreover, the steps involved in the derivation of the scalar inference might require
an extension of children’s processing resources, which is in line with a processing account.
Hu et al. 499
In fact, what we have proposed is simply that the complex semantics of cardinal existen-
tial quantifiers is likely to add further demands on these processing resources.
However, we believe that our findings are not easily reconcilable with the view
according to which difficulties in computing SIs are exclusively due to processing (or
pragmatic) limitations: if children’s problems only stemmed from a limited availability
of processing resources, or from an immature pragmatic system, it would remain unclear
how to model the interaction between a delay in the pragmatic module or limited pro-
cessing resources, as surfacing in the some-underinformative condition, and the diffi-
culty of properly interpreting cardinal some, as surfacing in the some-true condition. In
fact, no pragmatic computation was required in the some-true condition.
We can actually build on the second major finding of the present study to propose an
explanation of children’s performance with SIs in Mandarin Chinese. As already reported
for youyixie ‘some’ in Katsos et al. (2016), we found that some (5 out of 22) children
with RD and many children at age 5 and 6 have problems in correctly understanding the
truth-conditions of ‘some’ in Mandarin Chinese (yixie in our study and youyixie in Katsos
et al.’s study). It is important to highlight that when these children were asked to justify
their rejection of some in the some-true scenario, they always made reference to the
contextually-relevant universal set, by saying, for instance, that some girls included five
girls, and in the story ‘only three girls took an apple, and the other two girls did not take
an apple’. This non-adult-like behavior of Chinese children has never been reported for
English, Italian or French (e.g., Foppolo et al., 2012; Guasti et al., 2005; Katsos et al.
2016). This finding suggests that certain children who are still not able to compute SIs
also do not exhibit adult lexical knowledge of cardinal some: they are not able to inter-
pret this quantifier as the cardinal property ‘the set contains at least one element’ (as in
adult language), and in the absence of a well-defined cardinal specification, the relevant
set is referred to (by default) as a whole. Accordingly, we propose that these children
reject ‘some’ in the some-true condition because the cardinality quantifier remains actu-
ally semantically underspecified. In these conditions, no some/all scale can be activated
and this explains why they accept ‘some’ in the some-underinformative condition. This
conjecture also explains why they correctly reject some in a context in which none of the
individuals are doing the action denoted by the predicate (i.e., in the some-false
condition).
At first sight, this result is not consistent with the findings reported by Su and Su
(2015), as discussed earlier. However, note that in our study, yixie ‘some’ was used (a
cardinality quantifier), while in their study, youxie ‘some’ was tested (a proportional quan-
tifier). As we have seen, Arosio et al. (2016), who investigated children’s behavior with
the Italian proportional quantifier qualche ‘some’, found that proportional quantifiers
essentially yield an adult-like performance in the computation of SIs in children. In other
words, children tend to perform at ceiling in the some-underinformative condition when-
ever ‘some’ is a proportional quantifier (as is the case of qualche/quelques in Italian/
French). These results contrast with those in Katsos et al. (2016), where the Chinese car-
dinality quantifier youyixie was tested, and the finding was that children exhibited serious
deficits in non-pragmatic conditions. Significantly, however, these deficits concern the
some-false condition in Katsos et al.’s experiment, a datum that partially contrasts with
our results (i.e., the children performed at ceiling in the some-false condition), and that
suggests that differences in the experimental design might have played a role as well.
Summarizing, our results suggest some firm conclusions, while also raising intriguing
questions for future research. They suggest that processing (or pragmatic) limitations
play an important role in computing sentences involving scalar quantifiers, at least for
some individuals, confirming and extending the insights in Vender (2017), and as is
made particularly evident by the observation that the Chinese children with RD perform
worse than the age-matched controls and similarly to the younger TD children. At the
same time, though, our findings strongly suggest that these processing (or pragmatic)
limitations are not the whole story: they interact with a number of so-far largely neglected
lexical factors, from which we have tentatively disentangled the role arguably played by
the contrast between proportional and cardinality quantifiers, and the role played by an
incomplete lexical knowledge of the quantifier itself. Indeed, the data reviewed above
suggest that the acquisition of adult-like lexical knowledge of different classes of quanti-
fiers might follow distinct learning paths, and that immature lexicons might reflect in the
way lexical alternatives are accessed while computing SIs, confirming the insights in
Foppolo et al. (2012) and in Foppolo and Marelli (2017). At the same time, the residual
differences between our results and those discussed in the literature point to a possible
effect of the difference in experimental designs, suggesting that conclusions in this
domain are premature and that further research is required.
Finally, the line of analysis tentatively proposed here will have to be confirmed by
comparing the behavior of ‘cardinality’ yixie and ‘proportional’ youxie in Mandarin
Chinese more systematically and, more generally, by extending the investigation of car-
dinal and proportional ‘some’ to more languages where semantically distinct existential
quantifiers are attested.
Conclusion
While this study is the first to examine the derivation of SIs in Chinese children with RD,
it comes with a few limitations. One limitation, as mentioned, is that we did not compare
yixie ‘some’ and youxie ‘some’ with the same group of children. Another limitation is
that children with RD were poor readers assessed on the basis of literacy tests and teach-
ers’ reports, instead of children with diagnosed dyslexia who would have been the ideal
population for this investigation. Therefore, it might not allow us to generalize the find-
ings of the present study to dyslexic children across languages.
We leave these issues to future research and conclude by emphasizing that the present
study provides an important confirmation for the hypothesis that children with RD
exhibit a delayed knowledge of scalar quantifiers and SIs, as compared with age-matched
controls, and are in fact on a par with six-year-old children. These results support the
view that processing and/or pragmatic competence are impaired in some children with
RD. In addition, the overlap between the comprehension of some-underinformative and
some-true statements for children with RD and younger children was an original finding
of the present study, and it has been revealed as one crucial factor in modulating chil-
dren’s behavior with underinformative statements. We propose that this is related to lexi-
cal/semantic factors, among which is the neglected difference between proportional and
cardinality ‘some’. Arguably, these two classes of quantifiers trigger different patterns of
behavior in children. The line of analysis that we have tentatively proposed in the present
contribution will have to be confirmed by future research.
Hu et al. 501
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the children and the adults who participated in the study; to Gu
Xiaoming, Hu Zhangjian and Shan Wei who helped us out with the data collection; to Hu Zhizhi,
Huang Guoli, Xu Jun and Zhang Wenjun for their help in obtaining permission to work in kinder-
garten and primary school; and to Gaetano Fiorin who kindly made figures available for us. We
also thank Angel Chan, Stephen Crain, Maria Teresa Guasti, Hu Chanchan, Lin Yunqiang, Maria
Luisa Lorusso, Marco Marelli, Chloë Marshall, Chiara Melloni, Stephen Politzer-Ahles, Anne
Reboul, William Snyder, Yi (Esther) Su, Rosalind Thornton, Kenneth Wexler, Xu Dan, Zhang
Peixin, Zhang Yunqiu and Zhu Rui for their insightful suggestions. Authors’ contribution is as
follows: All authors conceived the experimental question, developed the experimental tasks, and
drafted the article; Shenai Hu recruited and tested the children, and the other authors supervised the
testing; Francesca Foppolo and Shenai Hu performed the statistical analyses.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for
the Central Universities under Grant Agreement No. 20720171054 and the European Union’s
Seventh Framework Program for research, technological development and demonstration under
Grant Agreement No. 613465.
ORCID iD
Shenai Hu https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5829-0977
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Appendix 1: Experimental items

Warm-up session (4 items)
(1) True condition:
五个女孩拿了樱桃。Five girls took a cherry.
两个男孩拿了足球。Two boys took a football.
Hu et al. 505
(2) False condition:

四个男孩拿了勺子。Four boys took a spoon.
两个女孩拿了胡萝卜。Two girls took a carrot.
Experimental items (20 items)
(1) some-true condition:
一些女孩拿了香蕉。Some girls took a banana.
一些男孩拿了西红柿。Some boys took a tomato.
一些男孩拿了口哨。Some boys took a whistle.
(2) some-false condition:
一些女孩拿了玫瑰花。Some girls took a rose.
一些男孩拿了杯子。Some boys took a cup.
一些男孩拿了橙子。Some boys took an orange.
(3) some-underinformative condition:
一些女孩拿了苹果。Some girls took an apple.
一些女孩拿了气球。Some girls took a balloon.
一些女孩拿了玩偶。Some girls took a doll.
一些女孩拿了棒棒糖。Some girls took a lollipop.
一些男孩拿了铅笔。Some boys took a pencil.
一些男孩拿了冰淇淋。Some boys took an ice cream.
一些男孩拿了南瓜。Some boys took a pumpkin.
一些男孩拿了小汽车。Some boys took a car.
(4) all-true condition:
一所有女孩拿了草莓。All girls took a strawberry.
一所有女孩拿了糖果。All girls took a candy.
一所有男孩拿了橡皮。All boys took an eraser.
(5) all-false condition:
一所有女孩拿了雨伞。All girls took an umbrella.
一所有女孩拿了裙子。All girls took a skirt.
一所有男孩拿了书。All boys took a book.
Appendix 2
Figure A1. (Continued)
Hu et al. 507
Figure A1. Visual stimuli for the sample context.

Scalar Implicatures in Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties

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845181

Maria Vender and Denis Delfitto

(1) John ate some of the cookies in the box.

(2) John ate all of the cookies in the box.

Understanding scalar implicatures: theoretical and

The computation of scalar implicatures in children with

‘Some’ in Mandarin Chinese

(4) Yixie ren na le pingguo.

(5) Youxie ren na le pingguo.

Youxie is considered to be equal to youyixie when the numeral yi ‘one’ is omitted. On

(7) Zhang San na le yixie/*youxie pingguo.

The current study

In addition, previous results on youyixie ‘some’ showed, as discussed above, that

Table 1. Participant characteristics.

Poor readers Typical readers TD age 6 TD age 5

(8) Yixie nühai na le pingguo.

(9) Suoyou nühai na le pingguo.

(1) some-underinformative condition

says: “Some girls took an apple.”

(2) some-true condition

says: “Some girls took a anana.”

(3) some-false condition

says: “Some girls took a rose.”

Figure 1. Examples of final outcomes displayed on screen in each condition.

Poor readers Typical readers TD age 6 TD age 5

Figure 2. Children’s target (pragmatic) responses in the some-underinformative condition

Poor readers Typical readers TD age 6 TD age 5

‘some’ in the some-underinformative condition also rejected ‘some’ in the some-true

Appendix 1: Experimental items

(2) False condition:

Figure A1. Visual stimuli for the sample context.

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