Group-denoting vs. counting: Against the scalar explanation of children's interpretation of `some'

The computation of scalar implicatures based on the scale ⟨some, all⟩ represents
a problem for children. This paper argues that the source of children’s difficulties
with interpreting ‘some’ is that it is ambiguous; it has a non-partitive
interpretation, corresponding to ‘a few’, which forms a scale with non-partitive ‘many’, and
a partitive reading, corresponding to ‘a subset of’, which forms a scale with ‘all’.
The two readings have different distributions; they are selected by different
predicates, and in Hungarian, they occur in different structural positions. We tested and
confirmed the hypothesis that young children are not sensitive to the partitivity
feature of ‘some’-phrases; they first acquire the non-partitive reading, which they
overgeneralize for a while. Experiment 1, a forced choice task, showed that the
default reading of ‘some’ NPs for six-year olds is the ‘a few’ interpretation. Exper-
iment 2, a truth value judgement task, demonstrated that children also accept the
‘not all’ interpretation of ‘some’, and the acceptance rates of the ‘a few’ and the
‘not all’ readings are similar irrespective of the partitivity feature of the given NP.