The littlest linguists and their superlatives : a first experiment

![CDATA[This paper presents novel experimental evidence for a restriction on the interpretation of superlative expressions such as (1) in English; while the absolute reading in (2) is available, the relative focus-internal reading in (3) is not. (1) (Sally bought the biggest painting by Monkey. (2) Absolute reading (ABS): Of the paintings produced by Monkey, Sally bought the biggest one. (3) Relative focus-internal reading (RIN): Of the paintings purchased by Sally, the biggest was produced by Monkey (and not other painters). While (2) is universally available, (3) is available only in language without articles (NP languages) (Pancheva & Tomaszewicz 2013; Shen, to appear). Recent accounts derive this interpretive restriction from a combination of syntactic conditions, i.e. the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2000) and anti-locality (Abels 2003), and a setting of the NP/DP parameter. We investigate the comprehension of such superlative expressions in English-speaking adults and 4-year-olds. We first present results supporting the generalization that English-speaking adults disallow the RIN. We then show that 4-year-olds have difficulty comprehending such structures. If 4-year-olds can be assumed to have knowledge of the universal syntactic conditions, and to have already set the NP/DP parameter by 4 (cf. Koulidobrova 2012), the results suggest that these ingredients are insufficient to derive the target interpretive restrictions. Finally, we discuss the learnability of such restrictions, given the observation that children appear to receive very little evidence in their input for structures such as (1).]]