LOGICAL AND INFERRED MEANING
OF QUANTIFIERS IN WILLIAMS SYNDROME
Benedict Vassileiou ([email protected])1,
Napoleon Katsos ([email protected])2,
Spyridoula Varlokosta ([email protected])3
1
Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain
Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
2
University of Cambridge, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, UK
3
Department of Linguistics, University of Athens, Greece
Williams Syndrome (WS) is a developmental disorder regulated by genetic (chromosomal)
abnormality. Along with an abnormal phenotype, which is mainly characterised by congenital
heart disease, individuals with WS present with uneven cognitive and language profiles:
mental retardation, weaknesses in non-linguistic processes (e.g. visuospatial and arithmetical
abilities, problem solving and design) and a range of strengths and weaknesses in linguistic
tasks, despite the claim that language skills in general are relatively spared. In this sense, WS
can be treated as one of the many ‘natural experiments’ that reveal aspects of the relationship
between language and cognition through patterns of selective impairments. Theoretical
proposals on the nature of the WS language profile range from modular views (Clahsen &
Temple, 2003; Pinker, 1999) to neuroconstructivist approaches (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998); the
recently proposed conservative hypothesis (Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith, 2003) points to
delayed ‘typical’ development–rather than deviant developmental trajectory–as a potential
source of atypical language in WS. Research has predominantly focused on phonology,
lexical semantics, and morphosyntax in individuals with WS (for a review, see Brock 2007).
Although a good mental-age-equivalent performance in receptive concrete vocabulary has
been repeatedly reported for WS adolescents (Bellugi et al., 1990; Brock et al., 2007,
Ypsilanti et al., 2005), their knowledge of special vocabulary with complex meaning has
drawn less research attention. The present study aims to first investigate the competence of
WS adolescents in the logical versus the inferred meaning of quantifiers, that is, a class of
words generating their meaning on the semantics–pragmatics interface. The logical meaning
of quantifiers is based on set relations, whereas the inferred meaning is generated by
pragmatic principles of informativeness through scalar implicatures (Grice, 1989). Our test
group consisted of nine Greek-speaking WS adolescents matched to two control groups of
nine typically developing Greek-speaking children each, for mental age and for language
ability respectively. A truth-value judgement task designed under the European COST
framework (e.g., Katsos et al. 2011) was conducted to test the two discrete meanings carried
by the quantifiers all, none, some, most, some…not, and not all in logical truth and felicity
conditions. Participants had to decide whether auditorily presented sentences like (a) were
correct or incorrect in combination with various displays of five boxes and five objects (e.g.,
apples).
a.
Most of the apples are in the boxes.
Given displays of four and two apples in the boxes, the example (a) was logically true and
false (i.e., correct and incorrect) respectively, whereas given displays of all five apples in the
boxes, the example (a) was logically true but pragmatically under-informative (i.e., incorrect
sentences). Our results can be summarised in four points: (1) the WS group performed overall
lower than the typically developing children; (2) in the logical-meaning conditions, the WS
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group performed lower than the control groups in all quantifiers and was biased towards
negative responses; (3) in the inferred-meaning conditions, the WS group yielded patterns of
very low scoring in positive quantifiers (some and most) alongside chance level in negative
quantifiers (some…not and not all), which partly resembles the mental-age-controls’ pattern;
(4) all groups performed consistently higher in the logical-meaning conditions than in the
inferred-meaning conditions. These findings reveal that understanding the complex meaning
of quantifiers on the semantics–pragmatics interface poses a major challenge to WS
adolescents. Moreover, their performance can be interpreted in the framework of mental-agedependent developmental delay, rather than as a deviant competence profile.
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