When the syntactic bootstrap breaks: some children think any means no

Children can use distributional information about where words occur to figure out their meanings. But what happens when two very different words not only have most of their distribution in common, but also compose to form indistinguishable sentential meanings in those common cases? As a negative polarity item (NPI), any is selectively licensed by certain linguistic environments, the most common of which is negation. This is the context in which children hear any in around 80% of their input. However, under negation, the meaning of any looks just like a negative quantifier in concord with the higher negation (a negative concord item; NCI). While studies of children’s production indicate that they hardly ever produce any without a licensing negation, suggesting competence with its distribution, we hypothesize that some children may have misanalysed its meaning. To investigate what children think any means, we tested 106 monolingual English-speaking children between 2 and 6 years of age, as well as 20 adults, in two picture-choice comprehension tasks. These tasks assessed their interpretation of any without a preceding negation, both in a licensed (free choice) and an unlicensed context. While most children interpreted any the same way adults did, we also found a group of children who systematically responded to any as if it meant no, consistent with a negative concord (mis)analysis. In addition to illustrating how much children rely on distributional information to learn such abstract words, this finding bears on several debates. It raises the question of whether it is possible to represent the licensing conditions of NPIs prior to knowing their meanings. And it suggests that children may be biased to assume that their language uses negative concord constructions even when it does not.