Bootstrapping the Meanings of Each & Every

Abstract

The universal quantifiers "each" & "every" have similar truth conditions, but differ slightly in representation. "Each" often has an individual-based representation, while "every" has a set-based representation. In this study, we investigate not only how learners might arrive at these representations, but also whether or not there may be signal in the distributional differences in parents' speech that kids may use to learn the meanings of "each" & "every". To do this, we conducted a corpus investigation of child directed speech, that included the quantifier's "each" and "every", in the CHILDES corpus.