We present a set of experiments investigating how English- and Japanese-speaking children interpret Measure Phrase comparatives (e.g., X is 10 meters taller than Y / X-wa Y-yori 10-meters takai). We show that despite overt cues to the comparative interpretation (i.e., the comparative -er morpheme in English, and explicit linguistic and visual reference to a contextual standard), children representing both languages diverge from their adult counterparts in that they access a non-adult-like ‘absolute measurement’ interpretation (i.e., X is 10 meters tall). We propose to account for their response pattern by appealing to proposals by Svenonius and Kennedy (in Frascarelli, ed., Phases of interpretation, Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and Sawada and Grano (Nat Lang Semant 19:191−226, 2011) that Meas in the head of the DegP, which houses the differential, selects for an absolute minimal value: zero. We argue that young children appeal to this absolute zero minimum in lieu of the correct derived standard, and must learn to override this value by appealing to the context to set the standard of comparison when interpretation requires them to do so.

中文翻译：

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调查英语和日语量词比较中的形式-意义映射

我们提供了一组实验，调查说英语和日语的孩子如何解读“量词组”的比较（例如，X比Y / X-wa Y-yori高10米takai高10米）。我们发现，尽管明显线索的对比解读（即比较-呃语素是英文的，明确的语言和视觉参考上下文标准），代表这两种语言的孩子从他们的成人同行的分歧在他们访问非成人类似于“绝对测量”的解释（即X高10米）。我们建议通过回应Svenonius和Kennedy（在Frascarelli，ed。，《阶段的解释》，Mouton de Gruyter，2006）以及Sawada和Grano（Nat Lang Semant 19：191-226，2011）中提出的建议来解释他们的回应模式DegP头部的测量值（包含微分）选择绝对最小值：零。我们认为，年幼的孩子会诉诸于这个绝对的零最小值，而不是正确的派生标准，当解释需要他们这样做时，他们必须学会通过诉诸上下文来设置比较标准，从而学会覆盖该值。