We evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics (as opposed to the input in syntax or phonology) is rich enough to systematically eliminate instances of the subset problem of language acquisition: overly general hypotheses about the meaning of every can violate pragmatic constraints, making such hypotheses incompatible with the child’s input. Our second finding is that the semantic input is too poor to eliminate instances of what we refer to as the superset problem, the mirror image of the subset problem. We argue that at least some overly specific hypotheses about the meaning of every are compatible with the child’s input, suggesting either that those hypotheses are not made available by UG or that non-trivial inductive biases are involved in children’s acquisition of every.

我们评估儿童在语义上的输入的丰富性及其与儿童可用的假设空间的关系。我们的案例是收购全称量词的每一个。我们报告有关收购的两个主要发现每个孩子导向和儿童环境讲话的语料库研究的基础上。我们的第一个发现是，语义输入（与语法或语音输入相反）足够丰富，可以系统地消除语言习得子集问题的实例：关于每种含义的过分笼统的假设可能会违反实用的约束，使这种假设与孩子的输入不符。我们的第二个发现是语义输入太差，无法消除我们称为超集问题（子集问题的镜像）的实例。我们认为，至少有一些关于每种含义的过分具体的假设与孩子的输入相吻合，表明要么这些假设都不能由UG提出，要么非平凡的归纳性偏见参与了孩子对每种语言的获取。