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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.
Research Subfield