David Barner

David Barner
University of California, San Diego | UCSD · Department of Psychology

Ph.D.

About

176
Publications
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
January 2008 - present
University of California, San Diego
July 2006 - December 2008
University of Toronto
January 2002 - December 2006
Harvard University

Publications

Publications (176)
Article
Full-text available
Numerate adults know that when two sets are equal, they should be labeled by the same number word. We explored the development of this principle—sometimes called “cardinal extension”—and how it relates to children’s other numerical abilities. Experiment 1 revealed that 2- to 5-year-old children who could accurately count large sets often inferred t...
Article
Children learn their first number words gradually over the course of many months, which is surprising given their ability to discriminate small numerosities. One potential explanation for this is that children are sensitive to the numerical features of stimuli, but don’t consider exact cardinality as a primary hypothesis for novel word meanings. To...
Preprint
Numerate adults know that when two sets are equal they should be labeled by the same number word. We explored the development of this principle - sometimes called ``cardinal extension'' - and how it relates to children's other numerical abilities. Experiment 1 revealed that 2- to 5-year-old children who could accurately count large sets often infer...
Article
Full-text available
How do children form beliefs about the infinity of space, time, and number? We asked whether children held similar beliefs about infinity across domains, and whether beliefs in infinity for domains like space and time might be scaffolded upon numerical knowledge (e.g., knowledge successors within the count list). To test these questions, 112 U.S. c...
Article
Children often display non-adult-like behaviors when reasoning with quantifiers and logical connectives in natural language. A classic example of this is the symmetrical interpretation of universally quantified statements like “Every girl is riding an elephant”, which children often reject as false when they are used to describe a scene with, e.g.,...
Article
English‐speaking adults often recruit a “mental timeline” to represent events from left‐to‐right (LR), but its developmental origins are debated. Here, we test whether preschoolers prefer ordered linear representations of events and whether they prefer culturally conventional directions. English‐speaking adults (n = 85) and 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds (n = 5...
Article
The Give-a-Number task has become a gold standard of children's number word comprehension in developmental psychology. Recently, researchers have begun to use the task as a predictor of other developmental milestones. This raises the question of how reliable the task is, since test-retest reliability of any measure places an upper bound on the size...
Article
Full-text available
Whether estimating the size of a crowd or rating a restaurant on a five-star scale, humans frequently navigate between subjective sensory experiences and shared formal systems. Here we ask how people manage this in the case of estimating number. We present participants with arrays of dots and ask them to report how many dots there are. Our results...
Article
Humans are unique in their capacity to both represent number exactly and to express these representations symbolically. This correlation has prompted debate regarding whether symbolic number systems are necessary to represent large exact number. Previous work addressing this question in innumerate adults and semi-numerate children has been limited...
Preprint
Children often display non-adult-like behaviors when reasoning with quantifiers and logical connectives in natural language. A classic example of this is the symmetrical interpretation of universally quantified statements like “Every girl is riding an elephant”, which children often reject as false when they are used to describe a scene with, e.g.,...
Preprint
Humans are unique in their capacity to both represent number exactly and to express these representations symbolically. This correlation has prompted debate regarding whether symbolic number systems are necessary to represent exact number. Previous work addressing this question in innumerate adults and semi-numerate children has been limited by con...
Preprint
How does cross-linguistic variation in grammatical structure affect children’s acquisition of number words? In this study, we addressed this question by investigating the case study of young speakers of French, a language in which the number one and the indefinite article a are phonologically the same (i.e., un). We tested how French-speaking child...
Preprint
The Give-a-Number task has become a gold standard of children’s number word comprehension and has been increasingly used to organize debate in developmental psychology. In this task, the experimenter asks children to give specific numbers of objects (e.g., 1 to 6), and based on their pattern of responses, children are classified into stages that ca...
Article
Full-text available
Although most U.S. children can accurately count sets by 4 years of age, many fail to understand the structural analogy between counting and number - that adding 1 to a set corresponds to counting up 1 word in the count list. While children are theorized to establish this Structure Mapping coincident with learning how counting is used to generate s...
Article
Full-text available
Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragm...
Article
Although many U.S. children can count sets by 4 years, it is not until 5½–6 years that they understand how counting relates to number—that is, that adding 1 to a set necessitates counting up one number. This study examined two knowledge sources that 3½‐ to 6‐year‐olds (N = 136) may leverage to acquire this “successor function”: (a) mastery of produ...
Chapter
The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of...
Preprint
Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragm...
Preprint
Recently, researchers interested in the nature and origins of semantic representations haveinvestigated an especially informative case study: The acquisition of the word most – aquantifier which by all accounts demands a sophisticated 2nd order logic, and whichtherefore poses an interesting challenge to theories of language acquisition. According t...
Preprint
Although many US children can count sets by 4 years, it is not until 5½-6 years that they understand how counting relates to number - i.e., that adding 1 to a set necessitates counting up one number. This study examined two knowledge sources that 3½-6-year-olds (N = 136) may leverage to acquire this “successor function”: (1) mastery of productive r...
Preprint
Although most U.S. children can accurately count sets by 4 years of age, many fail to understand the structural analogy between counting and number — that adding 1 to a set corresponds to counting up 1 word in the count list. While children are theorized to establish this Structure Mapping coincident with learning how counting is used to generate s...
Article
We tested 5- to 7-year-old bilingual learners of French and English (N = 91) to investigate how language-specific knowledge of verbal numerals affects numerical estimation. Participants made verbal estimates for rapidly presented random dot arrays in each of their two languages. Estimation accuracy differed across children’s two languages, an effec...
Article
By around the age of 5½, many children in the United States judge that numbers never end, and that it is always possible to add 1 to a set. These same children also generally perform well when asked to label the quantity of a set after one object is added (e.g., judging that a set labeled “five” should now be “six”). These findings suggest that chi...
Article
Full-text available
Children generally favor individuals in their own group over others, but it is unclear which dimensions of the out‐group affect this bias. This issue was investigated among 7‐ to 8‐year‐old and 11‐ to 12‐year‐old Iranian children (N = 71). Participants evaluated in‐group members and three different out‐groups: Iranian children from another school,...
Preprint
By around the age of 5½, many children in the US judge that numbers never end, and that it is always possible to add +1 to a set. These same children also generally perform well when asked to label the quantity of a set after 1 object is added (e.g., judging that a set labeled “five” should now be “six”). These findings suggest that children have i...
Article
Previous studies establish that reputation concerns play an important role in outgroup giving. However, it is unclear whether the same is true for ingroup giving, which by some accounts tends to be motivated by empathic concerns. To explore this question, we tested the extent to which 5 to 9-year-old children (Study 1: N = 164) and adults (Study 2:...
Preprint
When thinking about time, English-speaking adults often spontaneously recruit a “mental timeline” (MTL) representing events sequentially along a linear path from left to right (LR). The origins of the MTL are debated, but cross-cultural differences in the direction and orientation of the timeline suggest that factors such as writing direction play...
Poster
Time word comprehension in early childhood develops gradually between the ages of 3 and 7. Three-year-old children use deictic time words (e.g. yesterday, tomorrow) without associating them with adult-like meanings, an ability that only evolves by the start of elementary school (Tillman, Marghetis, Barner, & Srinivasan, 2017). First, children const...
Article
We test the hypothesis that children acquire knowledge of the successor function - a foundational principle stating that every natural number n has a successor n + 1 - by learning the productive linguistic rules that govern verbal counting. Previous studies report that speakers of languages with less complex count list morphology have greater count...
Article
Full-text available
Preschoolers often struggle to compute scalar implicatures (SI) involving disjunction (or), in which they are required to strengthen an utterance by negating stronger alternatives, e.g., to infer that, “The girl has an apple or an orange” likely means she doesn’t have both. However, recent reports surprisingly find that a substantial subset of chil...
Preprint
We tested 5- to 7-year-old bilingual learners of French and English (N = 91) to investigate how language-specific knowledge of verbal numerals affects numerical estimation. Participants made verbal estimates for rapidly presented random dot arrays in each of their two languages. Estimation accuracy differed across children’s two languages, an effec...
Article
Belief in supernatural beings is widespread across cultures, but the properties of those beings vary from one culture to another. The supernatural beings that are part of Hinduism, for instance, are represented as human-like, whereas those that are part of Islam are represented more abstractly. Here, we explore how children exposed to both types of...
Article
Full-text available
To interpret an interlocutor's use of a novel word (e.g., "give me the papaya"), children typically exclude referents that they already have labels for (like an "apple"), and expect the word to refer to something they do not have a label for (like the papaya). The goal of the present studies was to test whether such mutual exclusivity inferences re...
Article
Full-text available
Children's difficulty deriving scalar implicatures has been attributed to a variety of factors including processing limitations, an inability to access scalar alternatives, and pragmatic tolerance. The present research explores the nature of children's difficulty by investigating a previously unexplored kind of inference-an exhaustivity implicature...
Preprint
Belief in supernatural beings is widespread across cultures, but the properties of those beings vary from one culture to another. The supernatural beings that are part of Hinduism, for instance, are represented as human-like, whereas those that are part of Islam are represented more abstractly. Here, we explore how children exposed to both types of...
Preprint
Full-text available
We test the hypothesis that children acquire the successor function — a foundational principle stating that every natural number n has a successor n+1 — by learning the productive linguistic rules that govern verbal counting. Previous studies report that speakers of languages with less complex count list morphology have greater counting and mathema...
Preprint
This chapter outlines the contribution of analogical thinking in numerical cognition and specifically, to number words learning and numerical estimation. We begin with an overview of number word learning, followed by a description of analogical mapping as defined by Gentner (1983, 2010), and discuss how children might acquire the meaning of countin...
Chapter
Full-text available
The authors discuss the importance of pragmatic inference involving alternatives for language comprehension, reviewing the problem of restricting the inferential hypothesis space. They present a brief overview of theoretical and empirical work on adults and then turn to developmental evidence from two characteristic case studies: scalar implicature...
Preprint
How does linguistic structure relate to how we construe reality? In many languages, countable individuals like objects are typically labeled by count nouns (e.g., two rabbits, every truck, etc.), while unindividuated masses like substances are typically labeled by mass nouns (e.g., much mud, barrel of oil, etc.). These facts have led researchers to...
Preprint
It is typically assumed that count nouns like fork act as logical sortals, specifying whether objects are countable units of a kind (e.g., that a whole fork counts as “one fork”) or not (e.g., that a piece of a fork does not count as “one fork”). In four experiments, we provide evidence from linguistic and conceptual development that nouns do not s...
Preprint
How does world knowledge interact with syntax to constrain linguistic interpretation? We explored this question by testing children’s acquisition of verbs like weed and water, which have opposite meanings despite occurring in the same syntactic frames. Whereas “weed the garden” treats “the garden” as a source, “water the garden” treats it as a goal...
Preprint
Full-text available
To interpret an interlocutor’s use of a novel word (e.g., “give me the papaya”), children typically exclude referents that they already have labels for (like an “apple”), and expect the word to refer to something they do not have a label for (like the papaya). The goal of the present studies was to test whether such mutual exclusivity inferences re...
Article
During acquisition, children must learn both the meanings of words and how to interpret them in context. For example, children must learn the logical semantics of the scalar quantifier some and its pragmatically enriched meaning: ‘some but not all’. Some studies have shown that ‘scalar implicature’ – that some implies ‘some but not all’ – poses a c...
Preprint
The origins of logical concepts is one of the central topics in cognitive science. Cesana-Arlotti and colleagues provide novel eye-tracking measures from preverbal infants compatible withdisjunctive reasoning. However, the evidence is not conclusive. We provide a simpler object tracking account that would produce the same processing signatures. Fut...
Article
Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In this study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2‐ to 6‐year‐old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relations (i.e....
Preprint
Do children understand how different numbers are related before they associate them with specific cardinalities? We explored how children rely on two abstract relations – contrast and entailment – to reason about the meanings of ‘unknown’ number words. Previous studies argue that, because children give variable amounts when asked to give an unknown...
Preprint
Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In the present study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2- to 6-year-old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relation...
Article
How do children acquire exact meanings for number words like three or forty‐seven? In recent years, a lively debate has probed the cognitive systems that support learning, with some arguing that an evolutionarily ancient “approximate number system” drives early number word meanings, and others arguing that learning is supported chiefly by represent...
Preprint
In the present chapter, we provide an overview of this remarkable progress, and how the mass-count distinction provides a way forward for understanding other domains of linguistic meaning, and a model for interdisciplinary language research. In this chapter, we focus on the semantic notion of countability. In the first part of the paper, we begin b...
Article
Recently, researchers interested in the nature and origins of semantic representations have investigated an especially informative case study: The acquisition of the word most—a quantifier which by all accounts demands a sophisticated second-order logic, and which therefore poses an interesting challenge to theories of language acquisition. Accordi...
Chapter
Children exhibit sophisticated mental state (epistemic) reasoning abilities from an early age, but it remains unclear what role these abilities play in the development of pragmatic inference in language acquisition. Here, we examined the role of epistemic reasoning in scalar implicature. Experiment 1 found that most 4-year-olds successfully compute...
Preprint
Preschoolers often struggle to compute scalar implicatures (SI) involving quantifiers (some, all), and disjunction (or), in which they are required to strengthen an utterance by negating stronger alternatives. Recent reports find that a substantial subset of children interpret disjunction as conjunction, e.g., concluding from “The girl has an apple...
Preprint
One reason that word learning presents a challenge for children is because pairings between word forms and meanings are arbitrary conventions that children must learn via observation – e.g., the fact that “shovel” labels shovels. The present studies explore cases in which children might bypass observational learning and spontaneously infer new word...
Preprint
Deictic time words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow” pose a challenge to children not only because they are abstract, and label periods in time, but also because their denotations vary according to the time at which they are uttered: Monday’s “tomorrow” is different than Thursday’s. Although children produce these words as early as age 2 or 3, they d...
Preprint
Intuitive theories about the malleability of intellectual ability affect our motivation and achievement in life. But how are such theories shaped by the culture in which an individual is raised? We addressed this question by exploring how Indian children’s and adults’ attitudes toward the Hindu caste system – and its deterministic worldview – are r...
Preprint
Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre-existing perceptual and cognitiv...
Preprint
How do children acquire exact meanings for number words like three or forty-seven? In recent years, a lively debate has probed the cognitive systems that support learning, with some arguing that an evolutionarily ancient “approximate number system” drives early number word meanings, and others arguing that learning is supported chiefly by represent...
Article
Full-text available
We review advances in the experimental study of the mass-count distinction and highlight problems that have emerged. First, we lay out what we see to be the scientific enterprise of studying the syntax and semantics of the mass-count distinction, and the assumptions we believe must be made if additional progress is to occur, especially as the empir...
Article
Full-text available
When reasoning about time, English‐speaking adults often invoke a “mental timeline” stretching from left to right. Although the direction of the timeline varies across cultures, the tendency to represent time as a line has been argued to be ubiquitous and primitive. On this hypothesis, we might predict that children also spontaneously invoke a spat...
Preprint
Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre-existing perceptual and cognitiv...
Article
Previous studies report that children use color words haphazardly before acquiring conventional, adult-like meanings. The most common explanation for this is that children do not abstract color as a domain of linguistic meaning until several months after they begin producing color words, resulting in a stage during which they produce but do not com...
Preprint
We review advances in the experimental study of the mass-count distinction and highlight problems that have emerged. First, we lay out what we see to be the scientific enterprise of studying the syntax and semantics of mass-count distinction, and the assumptions we believe must be made if additional progress is to occur, especially as the empirical...
Preprint
We review advances in the experimental study of the mass-count distinction and highlight problems that have emerged. First, we lay out what we see to be the scientific enterprise of studying the syntax and semantics of mass-count distinction, and the assumptions we believe must be made if additional progress is to occur, especially as the empirical...
Article
Full-text available
Mental Abacus (MA) is a popular arithmetic technique in which students learn to solve math problems by visualizing a physical abacus structure. Prior studies conducted in Asia have found that MA can lead to exceptional mathematics achievement in highly motivated individuals, and that extensive training over multiple years can also benefit students...
Article
We investigated “scalar implicature” in adolescents and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to test whether theory of mind deficits associated with autism affect pragmatic inferences in language. We tested scalar implicature computation in adolescents with ASD (12–18 years) and asked whether they reason about mental states when computing i...
Preprint
When acquiring language, children must not only learn the meanings of words, but also how to interpret them in context. For example, children must learn both the logical semantics of the scalar quantifier some and its pragmatically enriched meaning: ‘some but not all’. Some studies have shown that this “scalar implicature” that some implies ‘some b...
Article
Recent accounts of number word learning posit that when children learn to accurately count sets (i.e., become “cardinal principle” or “CP” knowers), they have a conceptual insight about how the count list implements the successor function – i.e., that every natural number n has a successor defined as n + 1 (Carey, 2004, 2009; Sarnecka & Carey, 2008...
Article
Full-text available
Deictic time words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow” pose a challenge to children not only because they are abstract, and label periods in time, but also because their denotations vary according to the time at which they are uttered: Monday’s “tomorrow” is different than Thursday’s. Although children produce these words as early as age 2 or 3, they d...
Preprint
Interlocutors are typically thought to create models of discourse that represent information that is shared between speaker and listener (i.e., common ground) and information that is available only to the speaker (i.e., privileged ground). In this study, we investigated the conditions under which speakers update these discourse models to accommodat...
Preprint
Recent accounts of number word learning posit that when children learn toaccurately count sets (i.e., become "cardinal principle" or "CP" knowers),they have a conceptual insight about how the count list implements thesuccessor function - i.e., that every natural number *n *has a successordefined as *n+1* (Carey, 2004, 2009; Sarnecka & Carey, 2008)....
Article
This research examined children’s evaluation of public and private prosocial giving and whether such evaluation would predict actual behavior. We tested children between 6 and 12 years old (N = 192) in China, where children are socialized not to call positive attention to themselves. In Study 1, a significant age-related change was found; younger c...
Preprint
Set representations are explicitly expressed in natural language. Forexample, many languages distinguish between sets and subsets (all vs.some), as well as between singular and plural sets (a cat vs. some cats).Three experiments explored the hypothesis that these representations arelanguage specific, and thus absent from the conceptual resources of...
Preprint
What does mass–count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases(NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone?Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countableindividuals (e.g., cats) while mass syntax specifies reference tounindividuated entities (e.g., water). We evaluated this claim using t...
Preprint
We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular–pluralmorpho-syntax and children’s representation of the distinction betweensingular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using themanual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson &Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but not fo...
Preprint
The distinction between mass nouns (e.g., butter) and count nouns (e.g.,table) offers a test case for asking how the syntax and semantics ofnatural language are related, and how children exploit syntax-semanticsmappings when acquiring language. Virtually no studies have examined thisdistinction in classifier languages (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) due t...
Preprint
Young children typically take between 18 months and 2 years to learn themeanings of number words. In the present study, we investigated thisdevelopmental trajectory in bilingual preschoolers to examine the relativecontributions of two factors in number word learning: (1) the constructionof numerical concepts, and (2) the mapping of language specifi...
Preprint
How do children learn the meanings of words like many and five? Althoughmuch is known about the mechanisms that underlie children’s acquisition ofnouns and verbs, considerably less is understood of how children begin tolearn the meanings of words that refer to sets (e.g., number words andquantifiers). Here we argue that children’s acquisition of qu...
Preprint
When children acquire language, they often learn words in the absence ofdirect instruction (e.g., “This is a ball!”) or even social cues toreference (e.g., eye gaze, pointing). However, there are few accounts ofhow children do this, especially in cases where the referent of a new wordis ambiguous. Across two experiments, we test whether preschooler...
Preprint
We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English,causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relativeto speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks toassess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and wordextension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence that l...
Preprint
We investigated 4-year-olds’ understanding of adjective/nouncompositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpretingscalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall andshort itemsfrom nine novel objects called pimwits (1-9” in height), or from this arrayplus four taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind....
Preprint
Comparative judgments for mass and count nouns yield two generalizations.First, all words that can be used in both mass and count syntax (e.g., rock,string, apple, water) always denote individuals when used in count syntaxbut never when used in mass syntax (e.g. too many rocks vs. too much rock).Second, some mass nouns denote individuals (e.g., fur...
Preprint
When asked to ‘find three forks’, adult speakers of English use the noun‘fork’ to identify units for counting. However, when number words (e.g.three) and quantifiers (e.g. more, every) are used with unfamiliar words(‘Give me three blickets’)noun- specific conceptual criteria areunavailable for picking out units.This poses a problem for young childr...
Preprint
We explored children’s early interpretation of numerals and linguisticnumber marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey, 2004) thatchildren’s initial distinction between one and other numerals (i.e., two,three, etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between singular andplural nouns. Previous studies have presented evidence that i...
Preprint
It is often assumed that the primitive units of grammar are words that aremarked for grammatical category (e.g., DiSciullo, A.M., Williams, E., 1987.On the Definition of Word: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). Based on a review ofresearch in linguistics, neurolinguistics, and developmental psychology, weargue that dividing the lexicon into categories such...
Preprint
Previous studies report that children use color words haphazardly beforeacquiring adult-like meanings. The most common explanation is that childrendo not abstract color as a domain of linguistic meaning until severalmonths after they begin producing color words, resulting in a stage duringwhich children produce but do not comprehend color words. Co...
Preprint
Full-text available
Plural definite descriptions (e.g. the things on the plate) and freerelative clauses (e.g. what is on the plate) have been argued to share thesame semantic properties, despite their syntactic differences.Specifically, both have been argued to be non-quantificational expressionsreferring to the maximal element of a given set (e.g. the set of things...
Preprint
A study of 104 Japanese-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds tested the relationbetween numeral and quantifier acquisition. Experiment 1 assessed Japanesechildren’s comprehension of quantifiers, numerals, and classifiers.Relative to English-speaking counterparts, Japanese children were delayedin numeral comprehension at 2 years old, but showed no difference...
Preprint
Previous studies indicate that English-learning children acquire thedistinction between singular and plural nouns between 22 and 24 months ofage. Also, their use of the distinction is correlated with the capacity todistinguish nonlinguistically between singular and plural sets in a manualsearch paradigm (D. Barner, D. Thalwitz, J. Wood, S. Yang, &...
Preprint
This article explores the evolution of language, focusing on insightsderived from observations and experiments in animals, guided by currenttheoretical problems that were inspired by the generative theory ofgrammar, and carried forward in substantial ways to the present bypsycholinguists working on child language acquisition. We suggest that overth...
Preprint
Languages differ in how they express thought, leading some researchers toconclude that speakers of different languages perceive objects differently.Others, in contrast, argue that words are windows to thought—reflecting itsstructure without modifying it. Here, we explore the case study of objectrepresentation. Studies indicate that Japanese, Chines...
Preprint
We investigated how children and adults evaluate the “niceness” ofindividuals who engage in resource distribution, with a focus on theirsensitivity to the proportion of resources given. Across three experiments,subjects evaluated the niceness of a child who gave a quantity of penniesto another child. In Study 1 (N = 30), adults showed sensitivity t...
Preprint
When presented with an entity (e.g., a wooden honey-dipper) labeled with anovel noun, how does a listener know that the noun refers to an instance ofan object kind (honey- dipper) rather than to a substance kind (wood)?While English speakers draw upon count-mass syntax for clues to the noun’smeaning, linguists have proposed that classifier language...
Preprint
When faced with a sentence like, “Some of the toys are on the table”,adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking thesentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paperexplores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicaturesbecause they lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to words l...