Peggy Li

Harvard University | Harvard · Department of Psychology

We examine whether acquiring left/right language affects children’s ability to take a non-egocentric left-right perspective. In Experiment 1, we tested 10–13 year-old Tseltal (Mayan) and Spanish-speaking children from the same community on a task that required they retrieve a coin they previously saw hidden in one of four boxes to the left/right/fr...

People make use of different frames of reference (north-south; left-right) to talk about space. To explore the cognitive capacity that children bring to learning spatial language, Haun, Rapold, Call, Janzen, and Levinson (2006) examined children’s ability to notice and abstract invariant frames of references across instances. They found that 4-year...

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...

A study found that Dutch-speaking children who prefer an egocentric (left/right) reference frame when describing spatial relationships, and Hai||om-speaking children who use a geocentric (north/south) frame had difficulty recreating small-scale spatial arrays using their language-incongruent system (Haun, Rapold, Janzen, & Levinson, 2011). In five...

This article reviews psycholinguistic studies on classifiers that have provided insights into human categorization behaviors, human conceptual structures, and cross-linguistic universals and variations in language processing. Following the Classifier entry, the term “classifier” will refer to sortal classifiers (also known as individual or “count”...

In numerical classifier languages, such as Mandarin, classifiers are morphemes that occur next to numerals and “classify” nouns on some semantic basis (see entry on Classifiers). For example, ‘three cats’ in Mandarin requires the classifier zhī 隻, which is typically used with nouns for animals (sān zhī māo 三隻貓 ‘three CLASSIFIER cat’). Thus, nominal...

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...

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...

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, &...

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...

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...

Inspired by Syrett (2013), three experiments explored children's ability to distinguish attributives (e.g., "three-pound strawberries," where MPs as adjectives signal reference to attributes) versus pseudopartitives (e.g., "three pounds of strawberries," where MPs combine with of to signal part-whole relations). Given the systematic nature of the s...

Previous studies showed that children learning a language with an obligatory singular/plural distinction (Russian and English) learn the meaning of the number word for one earlier than children learning Japanese, a language without obligatory number morphology (Barner, Libenson, Cheung, & Takasaki, 2009; Sarnecka, Kamenskaya, Yamana, Ogura, & Yudov...

Languages differ in how they encode spatial frames of reference. It is unknown how children acquire the particular frame-of-reference terms in their language (e.g., left/right, north/south). The present paper uses a word-learning paradigm to investigate 4-year-old English-speaking children's acquisition of such terms. In Part I, with five experimen...

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...

By some accounts, speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, require classifiers to specify individuated meanings of nouns. This paper examines this view by testing how Mandarin speakers interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in four studies. Using a quantity judgm...

Language communities differ in their stock of reference frames (coordinate systems for specifying locations and directions). English typically uses egocentrically-defined axes (e.g., "left-right"), especially when describing small-scale relationships. Other languages such as Tseltal Mayan prefer to use geocentrically-defined axes (e.g., "north-sout...

In a recent study by Haun et al. (2011), Dutch-speaking children who prefer an egocentric (left/right) reference frame when describing spatial relationships, and Haillom-speaking children who use a geocentric (north/south) frame were found to vary in their capacity to memorize small-scale arrays using their language-incongruent system. In two exper...

Two experiments explored two-to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of classifiers, mandatory morphemes for expressing quantities in many Asian languages. Classifiers are similar to measure words in English (e.g., a piece of apple; a cup of apples), with the main difference being that classifiers are also required when counting s...

Languages differ in how they express thought, leading some researchers to conclude that speakers of different languages perceive objects differently. Others, in contrast, argue that words are windows to thought - reflecting its structure without modifying it. Here, we explore the case study of object representation. Studies of Japanese, Chinese, an...

When presented with an entity (e.g., a wooden honey-dipper) labeled with a novel noun, how does a listener know that the noun refers to an instance of an object kind (honey-dipper) rather than to a substance kind (wood)? While English speakers draw upon count-mass syntax for clues to the noun's meaning, linguists have proposed that classifier langu...

Previous studies indicate that English-learning children acquire the distinction between singular and plural nouns between 22 and 24 months of age. Also, their use of the distinction is correlated with the capacity to distinguish nonlinguistically between singular and plural sets in a manual search paradigm (D. Barner, D. Thalwitz, J. Wood, S. Yang...

We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English, causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relative to speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks to assess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and word extension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence th...

Shown an entity (e.g., a plastic whisk) labeled by a novel noun in neutral syntax, speakers of Japanese, a classifier language, are more likely to assume the noun refers to the substance (plastic) than are speakers of English, a count/mass language, who are instead more likely to assume it refers to the object kind [whisk; Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (...

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 of natural language are related, and how children exploit syntax-semantics mappings when acquiring language. Virtually no studies have examined this distinction in classifier languages (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) d...

When presented with an entity (e.g., a wooden honey-dipper) labeled with a novel noun, how does a listener know that the noun refers to an instance of an object kind (honey-dipper) rather than to a substance kind (wood)? While English speakers draw upon count-mass syntax for clues to the noun's meaning, linguists have proposed that classifier langu...

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous...

This paper examines possible influences of language on thought in the domain of spatial reasoning. Language communities differ in their stock of reference frames (coordinate systems to reference locations and directions). English typically uses egocentrically-defined axes ("left-right"). Other languages like Tseltal lack such a system but use geoce...

The count-mass distinction often served as a test case for asking how syntax and semantics are related, whether knowledge of one helps the acquisition of the other. Virtually no studies examined this distinction in classifier languages which supposedly lack the distinction. However, Cheng and Sybesma (1998) argued Mandarin as a classifier language...

this paper, we focus on one aspect of language and its potential effect on theory of mind development. Specifically, we examine the developmental relationship between children's ability to reason about evidence for their own beliefs and the beliefs of others and the acquisition of evidential vocabulary

This paper investigates possible influences of the lexical resources of individual languages on the conceptual organization and reasoning processes of their users. That there are such powerful and pervasive influences of language on thought is the thesis of the Whorf-Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis which, after a lengthy period in intellectu...

The Whorfian hypothesis, the thesis that the language one speaks has a strong and pervasive effect on the way one thinks, has returned to prominence after a period in intellectual limbo. Since languages differ in how they partition the spatial relationships into semantic categories, the spatial domain has become a popular test-bed for whether profo...

Crosslinguistic variation in vocabulary composition is usually attributed to differences in the structural properties of languages and correlated differences in the frequency and salience of different word classes in the input. Here we explore whether another property of the input, the extralinguistic contexts of word use, can account for the simil...

Some have proposed that speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, have to rely on classifiers for acquiring individuated meanings of nouns (e.g., Borer 2005; Lucy 1992). This paper examines this view by looking at how Mandarin adults interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quanti...