Supplementary material for the article "Be Precise if You Must: Asymmetric Patterns in the Comprehension and Production of Distributivity across Development"

This data set includes the supplementary material for the article "Be Precise if You Must: Asymmetric Patterns in the Comprehension and Production of Distributivity across Development". 

Abstract: Sentences with plural expressions can be ambiguous between a collective interpretation, where a group of agents acts together on a single object, and a distributive interpretation, where individual members act separately on different objects. Previous studies have identified developmental differences: adults tend to prefer collective interpretations and produce more explicit distributive marking, while children sometimes favor distributive readings and struggle to use disambiguating linguistic cues. This study is the first to compare both interpretation preferences and production patterns across three age groups: Italian-speaking preschoolers, second graders, and adults. In a picture selection task, participants chose between collective and distributive pictures in response to unmarked, distributive, or collective sentences. In a production task, they described scenes depicting either collective or distributive actions. Results showed that all groups – including, surprisingly, preschoolers – accurately comprehended both distributive and collective markers and interpreted unmarked sentences as collective. However, in production, adults and second graders were more likely to explicitly mark distributive rather than collective interpretations, while preschoolers rarely used any disambiguating expressions. We argue that these findings reflect a developmental shift in pragmatic competence rather than in lexical knowledge, contributing new insights into the interface between semantics, pragmatics, and language development.