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Must the Force Be with You?

Speaker
Valentine Hacquard
Affiliation
University of Maryland, College Park
Date
Wed February 7th 2024, 3:30 - 4:50pm
Location
Online

Children have been shown to struggle with the force of modals: they tend to accept possibility modals (like might) in environments where adults prefer necessity modals (like must), and necessity modals in environments where adults require possibility modals. In this talk, I present various studies which test the robustness of children’s modal difficulties, probe the potential linguistic and nonlinguistic sources of these difficulties, and point to how children eventually overcome them.