The Semantics of Gradable Adjectives in Italian-speaking Children and Adults

This paper investigates the interpretation of subsective relative gradable adjectives, such as ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘long’, and ‘short’, by Italian children and adults. Whereas much acquisition research has demonstrated that from very early on children use syntactic cues to distinguish adjectives and nouns and make mappings between syntax and semantics, very little is known on how children combine the meaning of words to derive the meaning of phrases. Indeed, only few studies have explored the emergence of compositional semantics, without however reaching a consensus as to whether children use the same principles as adults to guide the interpretation of new word combinations (see e.g., Schmidt et al., 2009; Panzeri et al., 2013; Weicker & Schulz, 2019). This paper investigates how children interpret adjective-noun combinations by restricting our domain to subsective relative gradable adjectives. We designed a card selection task, inspired by Barner & Snedeker’s (2008) experiment 1. Sixteen children and 20 adults were tested on the comprehension of Italian novel nouns modified by four subsective relative gradable adjectives lungo ‘long’, corto ‘short’, grande ‘big’, piccolo ‘small’. By testing children’s understanding of complex adjective-noun combinations in which the noun was a novel expression, we assessed whether they compute standards for novel sets of objects, while ensuring that previous ostensive learning could not account for their behavior. Our findings reveal that children set a standard of comparison based on the perceptual class of depicted objects and are able to compute standards of comparison to evaluate whether a novel object can be considered ‘long/big’ or ‘short/small’. In addition, we demonstrate that children apply the adjective to the depicted objects, which can be taken as evidence that they interpret the adjective-noun combinations compositionally. Finally, our results show that the vagueness property of gradable adjectives is instantiated in children’s and adults’ responses, which identify similar object(s) as borderline cases.