Mina Hirzel on modals in Language Acquisition

Mod Prod, published!

Now out in Language Acquisition from NYU's Ailís Cournane with alum Mina Hirzel and Valentine Hacquard, "Mapping modal verbs to meanings: An elicited production study on 'force' and 'flavor' with young preschoolers." The paper reports the results of studies aimed at determining which modal verbs children around age 3 prefer to use in situations that highlight either teleological necessity, or epistemic necessity. The studies find that children's preferences differ significantly from those of adults in the same community. They often use the same modal verbs and future auxiliaries interchangeably for possibility and necessity, a difference in modal 'force', and don't clearly understand that the same modal verb can be used to expressed different modal 'flavors.'

Mapping modal verbs to meanings

Modals (e.g., can, must) vary along two dimensions of meaning: “force” (i.e., possibility or necessity), and “flavor” (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor dimensions of modals. However, given the complex one-to-many mappings from forms to meanings, it is not clear what force or flavor children assign to the modals being tested. In this study, we use a sentence-repair task to test which modals 3- and 4-year-old children themselves prefer to produce in teleological (goal-oriented) and epistemic (knowledge-based) possibility and necessity contexts, and how these preferences differ from those of adults. Our results provide a first controlled look at which modals children use to express the major flavor and force dimensions of modal verb meanings. We shed new light on children’s modal systems, and show that learners generally distinguish modal flavors but struggle distinguishing forces.