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Abstract
Three experiments explored the development of three linguistic aspects of more in children's speech. Subjects were 56 children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. Experiment 1 addressed the nature of the early semantic content of more. Experiment 2 examined the child's differentiation of mass more from count more. Experiment 3 explored the child's use of more as a comparative marker on adjectives. The results suggest, first, that the child initially stores the meaning of more with a prototype, rather than with some more systematic, featural representation. In addition, children's linguistic understanding of the dual use of more as a quantifier of mass amounts and count amounts does not appear to develop until long after they have been using more appropriately in unambiguous contexts. Finally, children learn to use more as a marker on comparatives only after they have acquired -er as a comparative marker, and some time after they have been using more successfully in nonadjectival constructions.
... 01. The similar age of success in area and number contexts presents difficulty for the incremental acquisition of " more " (cf. Gathercole, 1985). The presence of children who could not be fit by the model provides a convenient control for methodological concerns about our tasks. For example, it could be argued that, because even infants can make discriminations of area (Brannon et al., 2006) and number of items (Izard et al., 2009) in visual displays—without language—it is poss ...
... Theories on the acquisition of comparative " more " fall into two categories: some, like Gathercole (1985), advocate the incremental learning account, where the child's earliest understanding of " more " is consistent with meaning greater-in-number and only later enriched to include an understanding of other dimensions (e.g., area) that generalizes to greater-in-amount; others, like Barner and Snedeker (2005) and Mehler and Bever (1967), have argued that children immediately understand " more " to mean greater-in-amount. We have highlighted an important challenge for the latter (immediate, domain-neutral) account that has not been the focus of previous investigation: namely, in order to use and understand " more " across various contexts (e.g., area and number), children must also master an interface between the meaning of " more " and the various cognitive representations of quantity. ...
... Our estimate of 3.3 years as the age of first understanding number and area " more " is consistent with the findings of Barner and Snedeker (2006) and contrasts with those of Gathercole (1985), and suggests that children of this age know that " more " can be applied to both numeric and nonnumeric stimuli. Children's success with our stimuli that remove any conflict between number and area also suggests that some of the number bias in the Gathercole (1985) study and in the Barner and Snedeker (2006) novel-noun condition may have been due to a general cognitive bias toward number over area whenever these dimensions are placed in conflict (i.e., this number bias may be independent of children's language understanding). This too is consistent with an immediate acquisition of a domain-neutral " more " meaning greater-in-amount. ...
Quantifiers are a test case for an interface between psychological questions, which attempt to specify the numerical content that supports the semantics of quantifiers, and linguistic questions, which uncover the range of possible quantifier meanings allowable within the constraints of the syntax. Here we explore the development of comprehension of most in English, of particular interest as it calls on precise numerical content that, in adults, requires an understanding of large exact numerosities (e.g., 23 blue dots and 17 yellow is an instance of “most of the dots are blue”). In a sample of 100 children 2 to 5 years of age we find that (a) successful most comprehension in cases with two salient subsets is achieved at 3 years, 7 months of age, and (b) most comprehension is independent of knowledge of large exact number words; that is, knowledge of large exact number words is neither necessary, as evidenced by children who understand “most” but not “four,” nor sufficient, as evidenced by children who understand “nine” but not “most.”
... Nevertheless, many theories of 'more' development have argued for a stage-like development of comparative 'more' understanding that only resembles the adult meaning after about four years of age (Clark, 1970;Gathercole, 1985Gathercole, , 2009). ...
... Because 'more' can be used to modify various dimensions in grammatical sentences (e.g., number or area) use of 'more' remains equivocal as to the specified dimension and other indicators in the phrase or the context must specify the intended dimension. The problem of determining the correct quantity dimension might be made easier by the presence of a mass/count-noun distinction, as in English (Barner & Snedeker, 2005;Gathercole, 1985). ...
... Even with a mass/count distinction in place, the development of 'more' may be incremental. Gathercole (1985;, for example, suggests that children may initially understand 'more' to only apply to count nouns (thus resembling 'many'), and only later revise the meaning of 'more' to be dimension-neutral and include quantification by non-numeric dimensions (e.g., area). The alternative is that children might learn the meaning of 'more' immediately as a domain general comparative that can apply equally well to multiple dimensions (e.g., number or area). ...
The psychology supporting the use of quantifier words (e.g., "some," "most," "more") is of interest to both scientists studying quantity representation (e.g., number, area) and to scientists and linguists studying the syntax and semantics of these terms. Understanding quantifiers requires both a mastery of the linguistic representations and a connection with cognitive representations of quantity. Some words (e.g., "many") refer to only a single dimension, whereas others, like the comparative "more," refer to comparison by numeric ("more dots") or nonnumeric dimensions ("more goo"). In the present work, we ask 2 questions. First, when do children begin to understand the word "more" as used to compare nonnumeric substances and collections of discrete objects? Second, what is the underlying psychophysical character of the cognitive representations children utilize to verify such sentences? We find that children can understand and verify sentences including "more goo" and "more dots" at around 3.3 years-younger than some previous studies have suggested-and that children employ the Approximate Number System and an Approximate Area System in verification. These systems share a common underlying format (i.e., Gaussian representations with scalar variability). The similarity in the age of onset we find for understanding "more" in number and area contexts, along with the similar psychophysical character we demonstrate for these underlying cognitive representations, suggests that children may learn "more" as a domain-neutral comparative term. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
... without attending to the comparative aspect, though still showing some understanding of the roots. Other studies conclude that children may not have the same interpretations of comparatives as adults and that their interpretation of even positive comparatives changes across development (Bishop & Bourne, 1985;Gathercole, 1985;Syrett et al., 2010). Overall, studies of comparatives have tested a range of words, including words that vary in polarity, but these are generally not broken down by word or even polarity, making it difficult to draw conclusions about the trajectories of different types of words. ...
... Based on previous work showing that the understanding of relational language shows a protracted development (e.g., Simms & Gentner, 2019), including some of the work with size words specifically (e.g., Bishop & Bourne, 1985;Gathercole, 1985;Syrett et al., 2010), we predicted that overall, children would improve on the task with age. We also predicted that the developmental trajectories would differ across words, in line with the gradualist view of word meaning. ...
The ability to compare plays a key role in how humans learn, but words that describe relations between objects, like comparisons, are difficult to learn. We examined how children learn size comparison words, and how their interpretations of these change across development. One‐hundred‐and‐forty children in England (36–107 months; 68 girls; majority White) were asked to build block structures that were bigger, longer, smaller, shorter, or taller than an experimenter's. Children were most successful with words that refer to size increases. Younger children were less accurate with smaller and shorter, often building bigger structures. The dimensional aspect of taller emerged gradually. These findings suggest that children's interpretation of the meaning of size comparison words changes and becomes more precise across development.
... These two distinct modes of quantification reflect important semantic interpretations associated with the count-mass distinction, an idea that dates back to Jespersen (1924) (cf. Barner 2009, 2018;Gathercole 1985). The question-answering QJT is also sensitive to an alternation between mass and count syntax, as shown by studies on the countability of flexible nouns (i.e., nouns that can easily shift between count and mass uses) (Bale and Barner 2018;Snedeker 2005, 2006). ...
... We can draw conclusions about which interpretations a sentence allows, only if all the possible readings are accessible. Second, morphosyntax is an important factor in specifying countability and in guiding children's acquisition of the countability of nominal expressions (e.g., Bale and Barner 2009;Snedeker 2005, 2006;Gathercole 1985;Gordon 1982Gordon , 1985, but it has not been empirically addressed in the interpretation of superordinates. A distinct typological feature of Mandarin allows us to do this. ...
The semantics of superordinate collectives (superordinates hereafter) such as English furniture are argued to be count or mass, or to allow both count and mass readings. When tested experimentally, however, it has repeatedly been reported that superordinates denote individuals in a wide range of typologically distinct languages, including Mandarin. A close examination of the experimental method and design commonly used in previous research suggests, however, that the attested individual-denoting reading might only be the preferred reading in neutral contexts rather than the only reading that superordinates allow. In the present study, using a Truth Value Judgment Task we investigate the interpretation of Mandarin superordinates by Mandarin-speaking adults and 4–6-year-old children. We found that bare superordinates can convey both individual-denoting and non-individual-denoting readings depending on specific contexts provided, but such contextual manipulation cannot override morphosyntax (the presence of an individual classifier that selects an individual-denoting reading only). Taken together, our experimental data indicate that both contextual and morphosyntactic information play an important role in the interpretation of Mandarin superordinates, but that they function in different ways. In a word, the present study contributes new data and opens new perspectives for further investigation in the interpretation of superordinates in Mandarin as well as in other languages.
... I consider a broad range of research relevant to how people understand comparative sentences, how children acquire them, and how adults evaluate them in context, to motivate a view of our semantic ontology which relates directly to representations and operations in extralinguistic cognition. Some of that research includes: (i) the acquisition pattern for the much/many distinction in English (Gathercole 1985); (ii) early knowledge of the meaning of more (Barner & Snedeker 2005, Odic et al. 2013; and (iii) the verification procedures employed in understanding comparatives in context (Pietroski et al. 2009, Lidz et al. 2011cf. Odic & Halberda 2015, Kotek et al. 2015, Hunter et al. 2017. ...
... And there is evidence that children' don't, either. One of the primary findings of the developmental study by Gathercole (1985) is that children extended much to plural nouns as late as 7 years 6 months, yet never extended many to bare nouns. This error pattern again suggests time taken to acquire a morphological exception. ...
This book re-imagines the compositional semantics of comparative constructions with words like “more”. It argues for a revision of one of the fundamental assumptions of the degree semantics framework as applied to such constructions: that gradable adjectives do not lexicalize measure functions (i.e., mappings from individuals or events to degrees). Instead, the degree morphology itself plays the role of degree introduction. The book begins with a careful study of non-canonical comparatives targeting nouns and verbs, and applies the lessons learned there to those targeting adjectives and adverbs. A primary distinction that the book draws extends the traditional distinction between gradable and non-gradable as applied to the adjectival domain to the distinction between “measurable” and “non-measurable” predicates that crosses lexical categories. The measurable predicates, in addition to the gradable adjectives, include mass noun phrases, plural noun phrases, imperfective verb phrases, and perfective atelic verb phrases. In each of these cases, independent evidence for non-trivial ordering relations on the relevant domains of predication are discussed, and measurability is tied to the accessibility of such orderings. Applying this compositional theory to the core cases and beyond, the book establishes that the selection of measure functions for a given comparative depends entirely on what is measured and compared rather than which expression introduces the measurement
... In particular, one can assess whether the child assigns a number or mass interpretation to the quantifier when it occurs in combination with mass and count nouns. Gathercole (1985b) tested children aged 2;6 to 6,0 to determine their understanding of more. In that study, sets of objects named by mass and count nouns were presented to the child. ...
... lO Adult subjects were also tested, and performed as expected in 93.6% of their responses. See Gathercole (1985b). Note that this calls into question Ware's (1979) position that more X has a neutral interpretation. ...
... We examine the countability of Mandarin animate nouns in a comparative structure (A has more N[s] than B). According to Bale and Barner (2009: Section 3.3), the comparative structure is "the most reliable way of assessing the count-mass semantics" (see also Bale and Barner 2018;Snedeker 2005, 2006;Gathercole 1985;Jespersen 1924). To illustrate, consider Example (6) (Example (13) in Bale and Barner 2009: 225). ...
Using animate nouns to refer to entities in the world involves a complex interaction of ontology, cognition and language. The present study evaluates two accounts of the use of animate nouns, with Mandarin Chinese as the vehicle for testing between the competing accounts. One account was proposed by Cheng et al. (2008. How universal is the Universal Grinder? In Marjo van Koppen & Bert Botma (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands, 50–62. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins). These researchers contend that the count interpretation is basic for Mandarin animate nouns, due to a lexical blocking effect. To access the alternative, mass interpretation requires some kind of pragmatic coercion. A second account was proposed by Pelletier, based on English (1975. Non-Singular reference: Some preliminaries. Philosophia 5(4). 451–465; 2012. Lexical nouns are both +MASS and +COUNT, but they are neither +MASS nor + COUNT. In Diane Massam (ed.), Count and mass across languages, 9–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press). We extend this account to Mandarin animate nouns, proposing that they are encoded in the mental lexicon with both a count sense and a mass sense. To adjudicate between the accounts, we conducted four experiments that were designed to assess the interpretation assigned to animate nouns by Mandarin-speaking children and adults. The experimental conditions manipulated both the syntactic structures of the sentences and the non-linguistic contexts in which those sentences were presented. The experimental findings support our proposal that both mass and count interpretations of animate nouns are available to children and adults when sentences are presented in contexts that are congruent with these interpretations. The findings also suggest that syntactic structure is an even more critical factor in determining the interpretation that is assigned to animate nouns in Mandarin.
... Negen and Sarnecka 36 argue a conceptual understanding of "more" is critical for performance on numerical discrimination tasks that ask children to indicate which of two sets has "more" comparatively (see also ref. 37 ). Research has demonstrated that hearing children conceptualize the word "more" as a numerical comparative around 3 years of age 37,38 , though whether oral DHH children acquire this understanding on a similar timeline is unknown. As one specific test of the role of language ability in numerical development, we considered when oral DHH and hearing children acquire a conceptual understanding of the word "more", and how this understanding 38 might relate to performance on numerical discrimination tasks. ...
Research has shown a link between the acquisition of numerical concepts and language, but exactly how linguistic input matters for numerical development remains unclear. Here, we examine both symbolic (number word knowledge) and non-symbolic (numerical discrimination) numerical abilities in a population in which access to language is limited early in development—oral deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) preschoolers born to hearing parents who do not know a sign language. The oral DHH children demonstrated lower numerical discrimination skills, verbal number knowledge, conceptual understanding of the word “more”, and vocabulary relative to their hearing peers. Importantly, however, analyses revealed that group differences in the numerical tasks, but not vocabulary, disappeared when differences in the amount of time children had had auditory access to spoken language input via hearing technology were taken into account. Results offer insights regarding the role language plays in emerging number concepts.
... While grouped together here to contrast with commonly studied words from other word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, sounds), routine-based words within this set are diverse. Each everyday word could make its own case study, and specific theories about each word's acquisition could be informed by prior research documenting children's use of these words over their first several years of life (e.g., uh-oh emerging as a response to the failure of an attempted action: Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1984; more first serving as a request and then becoming a quantifier, Gathercole, 1985;Weiner, 1974; no as the earliest-produced form of negation: Szabó & Kovács, 2022; thank-you as an explicitly taught and repeatedly prompted politeness routine: Gleason et al., 1984). Future research can continue to investigate how these words are first learned and produced, in addition to how children's semantic representations may change over development. ...
Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as uh-oh, hi, more, up, and all-gone, are typically among the first to appear in infants’ vocabularies. We combined a behavioral experiment with naturalistic observational research to explore how infants learn and represent this understudied category of high-frequency, routine-based non-nouns, which we term “everyday words.” In Study 1, we found that a conventional eye-tracking measure of comprehension was insufficient to capture U.S.-based English-learning 10- to 16-month-old infants’ emerging understanding of everyday words. In Study 2, we analyzed the visual and social scenes surrounding caregivers’ and infants’ use of everyday words in a naturalistic video corpus. This ecologically motivated research revealed that everyday words rarely co-occurred with consistent visual referents, making their early learnability difficult to reconcile with dominant word learning theories. Our findings instead point to complex patterns in the types of situations associated with everyday words that could contribute to their early representation in infants’ vocabularies. By leveraging both experimental and observational methods, this investigation underscores the value of using naturalistic data to broaden theories of early learning.
... Some lexical decision studies reported longer response times associated to the processing of mass nouns (Gillon et al., 1999;Mondini et al., 2009), whereas some others did not find any difference (Mondini et al., 2008;Franzon et al., 2016). A preference for countability is reported in studies on acquisition (Barner & Snedeker, 2005;Gathercole, 1985) and in neuropsychological studies Fieder et al, 2014;2015). Crucially, count syntax can be overextended to mass nouns even when other grammatical abilities are matured and/or spared, both in children's and patients' performance Semenza et al., 1997). ...
... Finding labels for the acoustic properties of the stimulus difference that are easy for young children to comprehend can be quite difficult. In fact it is during the preschooler years between 3 and 5 years old that children start frequently and appropriately producing the types of comparative adjectives typically used as labels in two interval paradigms (e.g., "louder," "quieter"; Gathercole, 1985). Two interval paradigms may also be susceptible to verbal response biases by the participants, for example the tendency to report "same" rather than "different," or "louder" rather than "quieter," similar to the bias to report "yes" rather than "no" that is often observed among preschoolers (2-5-year olds; Fritzley & Lee, 2003) This is not to discount the potential presence of biases in three interval tasks as well. ...
Auditory discrimination is an important perceptual skill that seems to develop substantially during early childhood and is predictive of key developmental outcomes like language ability. However, the estimation of reliable auditory discrimination thresholds is impeded by non-sensory limitations in young children that impact task performance. Here we used computerized simulations of child-like and adult-like performance, as well as novel behavioral task modifications with 3- and 4-year old preschool children and adults, to investigate key parameters in the successful estimation of auditory discrimination thresholds in preschool-aged children. The results indicated the most suitable adaptive procedure that is not widely used with young children (75% weighted 1-up 1-down procedure), an appropriate number of trials (20) and step size (relatively small). In addition, using a novel manipulation of level of physical engagement, it was found that threshold estimates are more reliable when children were given a task that involved greater physical engagement (i.e., 3D objects, rather than 2D images on a screen). The overall results provide recommendations for designing procedures to estimate thresholds in preschool or developmentally delayed children.
... Sassoon 2010; cf. Krantz, Luce, Suppes & Tversky 1971;Berka 1983;Roberts 1985); and (iii) it unifies otherwise disparate experimental results with children and adults (e.g., Gathercole 1985;Halberda & Feigenson 2008;Odic, Pietroski, Hunter, Lidz & Halberda 2013). ...
Comparatives involve various dimensions for comparison, but not anything goes: "more coffee" involves volume or weight, but not temperature, while "more coffees" involves number, not volume or weight. In general, the extant literature assumes that the difference between "more coffee/coffees" reflects a morphosyntactic ambiguity of "more", such that it spells out MUCH-ER with bare nouns, and MANY-ER with plural nouns. Semantically, MUCH introduces a variable over measure functions (with constraints), whereas MANY introduces a cardinality function. I argue for an alternative, univocal theory based on the decomposition MUCH-ER, and account for the observed patterns of constrained variability by means of a stronger condition on the selection of measure functions than has previously been proposed.
... à dangerouser and à more fast. Another finding from the elicited production studies with children was that children of all age groups were more accurate in their production of adjectives requiring-er forms than those requiring more comparatives, probably because children are more familiar with the kinds of short high-frequency adjectives that typically take --er comparatives than with adjectives that require analytic comparatives (see e.g., [34], [43]). ...
One important organizational property of morphology is competition. Different means of expression are in conflict with each other for encoding the same grammatical function. In the current study, we examined the nature of this control mechanism by testing the formation of comparative adjectives in English during language production. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during cued silent production, the first study of this kind for comparative adjective formation. We specifically examined the ERP correlates of producing synthetic relative to analytic comparatives, e.g. angrier vs. more angry. A frontal, bilaterally distributed, enhanced negative-going waveform for analytic comparatives (vis-a-vis synthetic ones) emerged approximately 300ms after the (silent) production cue. We argue that this ERP effect reflects a control mechanism that constrains grammatically-based computational processes (viz. more comparative formation). We also address the possibility that this particular ERP effect may belong to a family of previously observed negativities reflecting cognitive control monitoring, rather than morphological encoding processes per se.
... This debate sets up one possible semantic research question that would not be possible were the mass-count distinction initially defined in terms of both syntactic and semantic criteria: In languages that have a syntactic mass-count distinction, do some mass nouns have countable atomic denotations or are atomic denotations only possible for count nouns? It is with respect to this question that the quantity judgment data are critical (Bale & Barner 2009;see also McCawley 1979;Gathercole 1985;Barner & Snedeker 2005;Barner et al. 2008). Mass nouns such as furniture and equipment permit quantity judgments based on number in comparative sentences whereas nouns like water and mud do not. ...
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 empirical facts continue to grow in number and complexity. Second, we discuss the new landscape of cross-linguistic results that has been created by widespread use of the quantity judgment task, and what these results tell us about the nature of the mass-count distinction. Finally, we discuss the relationship between the mass-count distinction and non-linguistic cognition, and in particular the object-substance distinction.
... Previous research on area Weber fractions has been very mixed, with some work suggesting that area representations show poor Weber fractions (Morgan 2005) and others suggesting that it shows relatively good Weber fractions (Nachmias 2008), and correlations between area and number tasks have never been examined. Likewise, some work has suggested that, given a choice of encoding a set of objects by either number or area, number tends to be preferred by children (Gathercole 1985;Barner & Snedeker 2006;Cantlon, Safford & Brannon 2010) and infants (Cordes & Brannon 2008). Due to the conflicting literature, it is unclear that we have evidence for or against a similarity in Weber fractions between number and area representations. ...
Language is a sub-component of human cognition. One important, though often unattained goal for both cognitive scientists and linguists is to explicate how the meanings of words and sentences relate to the more general, non-linguistic, cognitive systems that are used to evaluate whether sentences are true or false. In the present paper, we explore one such relationship: an interface between the linguistic structures referring to individuals and non-individuals (specifically, count-nouns like ‘cows’ and mass-nouns like ‘beef’) and the non-linguistic cognitive systems that quantify and compare number and area. While humans may be flexible in how they use language across contexts, in two experiments using standard psychophysical testing we find that participants evaluate a count-noun sentence via numerical representations and evaluate a corresponding mass-noun sentence via non-numerical representations; consistent with a principled interface between language and cognition for evaluating these terms. This was the case even when the visual display was held constant across conditions and only the noun type was varied, further suggesting an important difference in how area and number, as well as count and mass nouns, are represented. These findings speak to issues concerning the semantics-cognition interface, the mass-count distinction, and the psychophysics of quantity representation.
... A more recent study by Barner & Snedeker (2005) fills this gap by experimentally investigating classical count and mass nouns as well as flexible and object-mass nouns. Basing themselves on Gathercole (1985), Barner & Snedeker developed a Quantity Judgment Task (QJT) to evaluate 4-year-old children's knowledge regarding the mass-count distinction in English. ...
This study reports experimental data on the acquisition of the mass-count distinction by Dutch-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). While verbal morphosyntax is known to be impaired in SLI, nominal morphosyntax has received less attention. The mass-count distinction provides an interesting test ground: count can have a plural morpheme: bal-en (‘balls’), but mass cannot: *deeg-en (‘doughs’). Flexible nouns can easily occur in either mass or count syntax (pizza/pizza-s). Finally, object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture) are syntactically mass, but quantify over individuals, and are hypothesized to have a lexical [+individual] feature (Bale & Barner 2004). Typically developing (TD) Dutch-acquiring children become sensitive to the mass-count distinction around age 6 (van Witteloostuijn 2013).
Hypothesizing that the primary impairment of SLI is in morphosyntax, and not in lexical-semantics, we predict that Dutch-speaking children with SLI older than 6 have most problems with the interpretation of flexible nouns (relying solely on morphosyntax), some problems interpreting classical count and mass nouns (supported by convention/world knowledge), and least problems interpreting object–mass nouns (relying solely on their lexical [+individual] feature).
Quantity judgments based on count and mass nouns were collected from 28 Dutch children with SLI aged between 6 and 14 years old and 28 individually age-matched TD children. Confirming our predictions, the children with SLI scored significantly lower than their TD controls on flexible nouns, and, albeit to a lesser extent, on classical nouns. This underscores the (nominal) morphological deficit in SLI. In contrast, no difference between groups was found on object-mass nouns.
... Thus, the authors argue, "'More apples' means 'more individual things', whereas 'more butter' means more homogeneous stuff." With this idea in mind and using a variant of Gathercole's (1985) quantity judgment task, Barner & Snedeker set out to assess children's knowledge of the mass/count distinction in English. ...
... A partir de la literatura resulta posible afirmar que esta estructura gramatical involucra cierta complejidad en su utilización. Incluso hablantes nativos difieren en su uso preciso, empleando la manera sintética o perifrástica indistintamente (Gathercole, 1985). Si bien la construcción de la forma comparativa de los adjetivos en inglés se rige por reglas concretas, cuestión que permitiría clasificarla como un error tratable y, por lo tanto, susceptible a un tratamiento de FC (Bitchener et al., 2005), esta forma gramatical involucra cierta complejidad en su utilización (Graziano-King, 2005) debido a que su construcción demanda elegir los elementos morfosintácticos adecuados (Adj. ...
While written corrective feedback (WCF) has proven to be effective for the treatment of certain grammatical structures (Ferris & Roberts, 2001), there are still many factors that hinder the achievement of categorical outcomes. Some of these relate to the type of structures that benefit of such a treatment, distinct learning contexts, assorted students’ linguistic competence, among others (Hyland & Hyland, 2006; Guénette; 2007). This research studies two strategies of indirect WCF; i.e. indirect with indication and localization and indirect with indication, localization and metalinguistic explanation, in the treatment of comparative form of adjectives in English at school level. The objectives are 1) to examine the effectiveness of WCF in the treatment of a form that, as far as we know, has not been previously studied and 2) to strengthen the empirical evidence in learning contexts that have been poorly researched. This first approach is an unprecedented approach that contributes to strengthening and increasing the existing empirical evidence in the field of WCF. The sample consisted of 24 students in 8th grade at primary school with a basic level of proficiency in English as a foreign language. Results show that both types of feedback improve the accurate use of the target form but it is indirect WCF with indication and localization the strategy that longer retains the gain. These data support a facilitative role of WCF in the treatment of the studied grammar structure.
... The reason behind children's responses in those Piagetian studies could be related to the difficulty children have in understanding 160 the word more. After all, more is used in many different ways with different meanings (Clark 1970; Gathercole 1985; Barner & Snedeker 2005). Sometimes more can be used in an additive manner, and other times it can be used as a comparative, and the dimension of comparison can vary (Barner & Snedeker 2005). ...
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 syntax-semantics mapping , we asked whether children are able to use syntax to interpret how entities are quantified. In Experiment 1, four-and five-year-olds were asked to choose between two characters for the one who was selling appropriate items matching an attributive or pseudopartitive expression. In Experiment 1, children of the same age heard items described with a phrase using either an attributive, a pseudopartitive, "each" ("each weighs three pounds"), or "all together" ("all together they weigh three pounds"). At test, with some items removed, children were asked whether the same phrase applied to the remaining items (e.g., "Does Dora still have three-pound strawberries?"). Children did not distinguish between attributives and pseudopartitives but did so for " each " and " all together. " Experiment 3 extends the age range with a third experimental design. Children heard "each" or "all together" descriptions (e.g., "each strawberry weighs three pounds") and judged, at test, which of two characters "said it better" (i.e., "Mickey says 'these are two pounds of strawberries,' but Donald says 'these are two-pound strawberries.'"). Children under six were at chance. Together, the three experiments suggest that despite its systematicity, children do not automatically appreciate the mapping between syntax and semantics.
... p. 379). (Note, however, that the forms do not seem to 'mean' those less-complex meanings, if one takes into consideration the complete range of usage, see Gathercole, 1983Gathercole, , 1985b On the face of it, this might be taken as evidence in favor of a cognitionfirst approach for acquisition: The meanings children attached to complex linguistic forms were associated with their developing cognitive abilities. However, there are two elements of the acquisition of these forms that argue in favor of an interactionist view. ...
... More recent, and most relevant for the present investigation is the work of David Barner and his colleagues, and in particular, Barner & Snedeker (2005), whose experimental design we adopted and adapted to pa in the current investigation. Using a variant of Gathercole's (1985) quantity judgment task, Barner & Snedeker set out to assess children's knowledge of the mass/count distinction in English. ...
The theoretical literature on the mass/count distinction in Palestinian-Arabic (PA) is extremely scarce, and the psycholinguistic perspective has never been explored. In this paper, we report results from an experiment exploring the mass/count distinction in 48 (aged 6;6-17;04) young and adult speakers of PA. Using an adaptation of Barner & Snedeker's (2005) Quantity-Judgment task, we show that while PA-speaking adults are essentially identical to English-speaking adults, PA-speaking children behave dramatically different from both adult PA speakers and from English-acquiring children. We suggest that these results may reflect a process of language change currently taking place in PA. We further propose two possible sources for the process. The first involves the fact that the grammaticization of mass/count in PA is rather marginal, as indicated by the relative paucity of syntactic structures encoding the distinction. Alternatively, our data may reflect a change process involving a relaxation of obligatory number-marking in cardinality contexts. Finally, we outline a research-program aimed to test these hypotheses.
... As a result, vague counting is only found in the context of plurals and collective nouns. The difference between a 'counting' interpretation and a 'global quantity' interpretation has a truth-conditional effect in cases such as (15) (see Gathercole 1985, Doetjes 1997. In the first sentence, the number of chocolates that Peter ate is larger than the number of chocolates that John ate. ...
This paper defends the hypothesis that number and classifiers behave differently in nominal and in verbal structures. When numerals are used in order to ‘count’ a number of objects or events, they interact differently with nouns and verbs (compare three visits with to visit three *(times)). Degree modifiers, on the other hand, behave rather similarly in the nominal and in the verbal domains (compare a lot of visits with to visit a lot). The paper discusses the source of this difference. In many languages, numerals require the presence of classifiers and/or number, while degree modifiers are sensitive to cumulative reference, a property shared by nominal and verbal structures. Given the hypothesis that nouns and verbs interact differently with number and classifiers, the different behaviour of numerals with nouns and verbs can be understood.
... Children seem to have a relatively early command of the plural and of the use of a, another, some, and numerals. (A number of the elements, however, seem to take much longer to acquire, such as the distinction between much and many, between little and few, and between the Mass and Count uses of more (Gathercole, 1985a(Gathercole, , 1985b(Gathercole, , 1986.) Children's early command of these constructs, then, might influence their first guesses about the meanings of new words. ...
This study asks whether knowledge of the functional properties of a referent for a new name influences children's first guesses about whether that name refers to an object or a substance. Recent work on children's categorization suggests that children differentiate concrete objects from nonsolid substances and that their initial hypotheses about the meanings of new words are affected by this knowledge of ontological categories. In addition, some research has suggested that children approach new words with a set of biases that constrain the possible meanings of those words. Most of this work has presented children with new names in the absence of explicit information about the functional characteristics of new referents. Our hypothesis was that if children are shown the functional properties of referents, they should use that information in making their first guesses about the meanings of new words. Seventy-two 3- and 4-year-olds were shown new items with new names and were tested on their extension of each new name either to a similarly shaped item made of a different material or to a differently shaped item made of the same material. Some subjects were shown a “shape-linked” function, some a “substance-linked” function, and some no function at all. One third of the subjects heard the new names presented with count syntax, one third with mass syntax, and one third with neutral syntax. Results suggest that children do not rely on a single source of information in extending new names, but, rather, draw on various kinds of information, including the perceptual characteristics of the entities themselves and the syntax of the input.
... Thus, the authors argue, "'More apples' means 'more individual things', whereas 'more butter' means more homogeneous stuff." With this idea in mind and using a variant of Gathercole's (1985) quantity judgment task, Barner & Snedeker set out to assess children's knowledge of the mass/count distinction in English. ...
... Barner & Snedeker (in press) asked participants to perform quantity judgments for familiar mass and count nouns to determine whether a systematic difference exists between how words from each category quantify. For example, participants judged three tiny shoes to be more shoes than one giant shoe and one giant portion of butter to be more butter than three tiny portions (suggesting that participants individuated for the count nouns, but not the mass nouns, see also Gathercole, 1985). However, they also tested participants with "objectmass" terms like furniture, jewelry, mail, and clothing, in order to evaluate whether mass nouns specify a uniform dimension of measurement, or whether certain mass nouns can quantify over individuals (as suggested by Gillon, 1996, andChierchia, 1998). ...
... In all likelihood, these processes are continually ongoing. First, children's acquisition of the forms used in their language is continually advancing, not always with an immediate concomitant understanding of those forms (see, for example, the use of comparative forms in young children's speech, e.g., Gathercole, 1983Gathercole, , 1985. At the same time, children's cognitive knowledge does not remain static, but continually develops (e.g., older children eventually develop conceptual understanding of number, of seriation, of conservation; even older children and adults develop conceptual understanding of more abstract concepts such as scientific theories, and so forth). ...
This special issue focuses on evidence bearing on the specific ways in which linguistic differences across languages may affect what is learned early (or late) in language and to what extent language-specific structures interact with cognition. The ultimate question is whether or not development follows a universal course or is influenced by the linguistic system being acquired. Of particular interest in the linguistic realm are data exploring what governs the late development of linguistic forms; of particular interest in the cognitive realm are areas for which crosslinguistic data reveal linguistic influences on the timing of development of cognitive concepts or on attentional patterns in children. The combined research suggests that the morphosyntactic structure of the language, the semantic notions encoded in the language and the cognitive underpinnings related to those structures all play a role in the course of development.
... Cependant, on peut penser qu'il n'en va pas toujours de même pour des enfants de moins de 6 ans, à l'intérieur de tâches moins complexes du point de vue « métalinguistique », que celle utilisée dans l'expérience pionnière. D'autant plus que les nombreuses études consacrées aux termes relationnels tels que more et less (Gathercole, 1985), ou « au-dessus de » et « au-dessous de » (Piérart, 1978), « sous » (Holzman, 1981) indiquent qu'entre 3 et 5 ans des effets génétiques liés aux difficultés d'appréhension du sens de ces termes et aux constructions cognitivo-linguistiques sous-jacentes existent. ...
How four to eleven year old french children understand the adverb « presque » (« almost », « nearly »).
Four to eleven year old children had to draw some objects « nearly » (« presque ») « by the side » (« a cote de »), « close by » (« contre ») or « in the middle of », (« à la moitié de ») another object; or to divide some continuous or discontinuous quantities in such a way that they get « almost » («presque »), « like that » («pareil » — « la même chose ») ,or «as much/many » (« autant ») of them. The results of this experiment allow us to hypothesise a developmental evolution of the comprehension of « presque ». From 4 to 7, « presque » indicates the zone around the referential point, this point included. Later, the upper zone is excluded of possible interpretations. Moreover, until 7 years old the quantity which is modulated by the adverb exerts a great influence on the interpretation, the bigger the referential quantity is the farther from the referential border is the point indicated by « presque ».
Key-words : language development, adverb, nearly/almost («presque »), approximation.
... It is also plausible to assume that holistic similarity to the prototype is more important in the generalization process than isolated semantic features (cf. Gathercole, 1983Gathercole, , 1985. It will be a matter for future research to establish whether this is indeed the case. ...
... A second area of difficulty concerning comprehension involves terminology. Studies of children's understanding of language indicate that relative and contrastive words (e.g., "more," "less," "some," "although") are often misinterpreted by children younger than 7 years of age (Gathercole, 1985;Grieve & Stanley, 1984;Smith, 1980;Townsend, 1974). Such terms are frequently used in explanations of frightening phenomena that have some probability of occurrence. ...
... First, in the word extension task (see Soja et al., 1991), participants were shown two additional items (1 that matched the standard in shape, the other in substance) and were asked to choose which of the two the novel word named: " Show me some/a fem. " Second , in the quantity judgment task, participants were shown two characters (Farmer Brown and Captain Blue); one who was shown with the standard object, and the other who was shown with three miniature versions of the object (for a similar procedure, see Gathercole, 1985). The standard items had a greater overall mass and volume than the three miniature objects, but they were otherwise identical in shape and substance. ...
How does mass–count syntax affect word meaning? Many theorists have proposed that count nouns denote individuals, whereas mass nouns do not (Bloom, 1999; Gordon, 1985; Link, 1983), a proposal that is supported by prototypical examples of each (table, water). However, studies of quantity judgments in 4-year-olds and adults demonstrate that some mass nouns (furniture) do denote individuals (Barner & Snedeker, 2005). This is problematic for bootstrapping theories that posit one-to-one syntax-semantics mappings (individual ↔ count; nonindividual ↔ mass; Bloom, 1999), unless mass nouns that denote individuals are late-learned exceptions to mappings. This article investigates this possibility in 3-year-olds and adults using 2 methods: word extension and quantity judgment. Both methods indicate that novel mass nouns can denote individuals in both age groups, and thus fail to support simpli-fied syntax-semantics mappings. Also, differences between word extension and quantity judgment raise the possibility that the tasks measure different underlying knowledge. How does syntax contribute to the interpretation of individual words? Psycholo-gists, philosophers, and linguists have long been concerned with the question of how syntax and semantics are related, but for developmental psychologists, the question takes on a special significance. Beyond understanding the relation be-tween syntactic structures and their interpretation, there is the additional challenge of figuring out how children discover this relation in acquisition. The mass–count LANGUAGE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT, 2(3), 163–194 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
... In English, the specification of number sends a ripple through the language, determining a word's status as mass or count, licensing the use of plural morphology, and selecting among measure terms such as many and much. Children begin to show signs of such knowledge early in language acquisition, with plural production and comprehension emerging as early as 2 years of age (Brown, 1973; Cazden, 1968; Ferenz & Prasada, 2002; Gordon, 1988), sensitivity to the mass-count distinction evidenced by around 2;6 years (see Soja, 1992), and the use of measure terms like more and less emerging between 2;6 and 3 years of age (Donaldson & Balfour, 1968; Gathercole, 1985; Palermo, 1973). The mass-count distinction provides a particularly interesting case of number specification, because it entrains important consequences for both the syntax and semantics of noun phrases. ...
Various theories propose that count nouns are distinguished from mass nouns by their specification of individuation. We present evidence that, while 3-year-old children acquiring language extend words differentially on the basis of mass-count syntax, they quantify over individuals for both novel mass and count nouns. We suggest that children may begin acquisition with an underspecified representation of mass noun semantics, permitting quantification over both individuals and continuous quantities. Also, children may rely on ontologically based biases to guide quantification.
... Explanations of this type require the use of relative frequencies or probabilistic concepts that are beyond the grasp of many young children. Studies indicate that children younger than 7 years often misinterpret relative quantifiers such as "more," "most," and "some" Gathercole, 1985;Grieve & Stanley, 1984;Townsend, 1974). For example, a recent study reported that one-third of a group of 5-to 7-year-olds did not interpret the word "most" as referring to a greater amount than "some." ...
... 5 Based on these observations, we submit that the comparative methodology offers the most reliable way of assessing mass-count semantics, since judgments are almost exclusively affected by alternations in mass-count syntax. In taking this view, we follow McCawley (1979), and psychologists such as Gathercole (1985), and Barner and colleagues (Barner & Snedeker 2005, 2006Barner et al. 2008), who have all used comparative constructions to test the semantic distinction between mass and count nouns (see also Cresswell 1976, who used comparatives to support his proposal that NPs are essentially measurement relations). ...
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 syntax but never when used in mass syntax (e.g. too many rocks v. too much rock). Second, some mass nouns denote individuals (e.g. furniture) while others do not (e.g. water). In this article, we show that no current theory of mass–count semantics can capture these two facts and argue for an alternative
theory that can. We propose that lexical roots are not specified as mass or count. Rather, a root becomes a mass noun or count
noun by combining with a functional head. Some roots have denotations with individuals while others do not. The count head
is interpreted as a function that maps denotations without individuals to those with individuals. The mass head is interpreted
as an identity function making the interpretation of a mass noun equivalent to the interpretation of the root. As a result,
all count nouns have individuals in their denotation, whereas mass counterparts of count nouns do not. Also, some roots that
have individuals in their denotations can be used as mass nouns to denote individuals.
... For example, a large literature has investigated children's capacity to distinguish the pragmatics of quantifiers like some and all and other subtle semantic and pragmatic distinctions that are mastered later in acquisition (see Brooks & Braine, 1996;Crain & Thornton, 1998;Drozd & van Loosbroek, 1998;Ferenz & Prasada, 2002;Gualmini, 2003;Inhelder & Piaget, 1964;Meroni, Gualmini, & Crain, 2000;Neimark & Chapman, 1975;Papafragou & Schwarz, 2006;Philip, 1996;Stickney, 2007). Also, numerous studies have investigated children's understanding of distinctions like that between more and less (Donaldson & Balfour, 1968;Donaldson & Wales, 1970;Gathercole, 1985;Palermo, 1973;Wannemacher & Ryan, 1978;Weiner, 1974). Relatively little attention has been paid to children's earliest comprehension of quantifiers as a class. ...
We explored children's early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. Daedalus, 59-68) that children's initial distinction between one and other numerals (i.e., two, three, etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between singular and plural nouns. Previous studies have presented evidence that in languages without singular-plural morphology, like Japanese and Chinese, children acquire the meaning of the word one later than in singular-plural languages like English and Russian. In two experiments, we sought to corroborate this relation between grammatical number and integer acquisition within English. We found a significant correlation between children's comprehension of numerals and a large set of natural language quantifiers and determiners, even when controlling for effects due to age. However, we also found that 2-year-old children, who are just acquiring singular-plural morphology and the word one, fail to assign an exact interpretation to singular noun phrases (e.g., a banana), despite interpreting one as exact. For example, in a Truth-Value Judgment task, most children judged that a banana was consistent with a set of two objects, despite rejecting sets of two for the numeral one. Also, children who gave exactly one object for singular nouns did not have a better comprehension of numerals relative to children who did not give exactly one. Thus, we conclude that the correlation between quantifier comprehension and numeral comprehension in children of this age is not attributable to the singular-plural distinction facilitating the acquisition of the word one. We argue that quantifiers play a more general role in highlighting the semantic function of numerals, and that children distinguish between numerals and other quantifiers from the beginning, assigning exact interpretations only to numerals.
Numerical order and magnitude are important aspects of early number knowledge. We investigated children’s understanding of relational vocabulary for representing and communicating about order (before/after) and magnitude (bigger/smaller, more/less). In Experiment 1, 4- to 7-year-old children compared symbolic numbers, non-symbolic discrete quantities, and continuous amounts using relational words (N = 151). In Experiment 2, 4- to 6-year-old children made yes/no judgements of ordinal and magnitude relations between symbolic numbers (N = 60). Children showed lower performance with ordinal vocabulary compared to magnitude vocabulary (Experiment 1). Further, children were less likely to endorse the use of ordinal language for non-consecutive numbers than consecutive numbers, but showed no difference for magnitude language (e.g., 6 and 7 are bigger than 5, but only 6 comes after 5; Experiment 2). These results suggest a divergence in children’s understanding of magnitude and ordinal vocabulary, suggesting a dissociation between these two concepts and/or the language used to communicate about them.
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 the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing).
In-depth overview of the acquisition of word meaning in children.
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. According to some reports, children acquire most as early as three years of age, suggesting that it does not draw on cardinal representations of quantity (contrary to some formal accounts), since adult-like knowledge of counting emerges later in development. Other studies, however, have provided evidence that children acquire most much later—possibly by the age of 6 or 7—thereby drawing this logic into question. Here we explore this issue by conducting a series of experiments that probed children’s knowledge of most in different ways. We conclude that children do not acquire an adult-like meaning for most until very late in development—around the age of 6—and that certain behaviors which appear consistent with earlier knowledge are better explained by children’s well-attested bias to select larger sets (a “more” bias), especially when tested with unfamiliar words.
The count/mass distinction is a domain of human language that is strongly related to human cognition. This review starts with an overview of recent research on individuation in relation to core knowledge systems (in particular the systems of object representation, agent representation, and number representation), followed by a brief overview of the role these representations play in the acquisition of count meaning. I then discuss linguistic aspects of individuation and the count/mass distinction in more detail. I distinguish between the grammatical systems of languages and the lexical properties of nouns, focusing on crosslinguistic variation. Languages vary substantially in the grammatical conditions that quantity expressions impose on the nouns they combine with, as well as in the exact lexical and grammatical properties of nouns. At the same time, individuation and counting seem to play a role in all languages, and similar counting strategies show up in unrelated languages. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics Volume 3 is January 14, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
This paper is a corpus linguistic analysis of 1000 random path-, road-, and way-instances from the British National Corpus. The aim is to show that both non-metaphorical and metaphorical instances of these terms (e.g. the bushes had grown across the path and the path of green consumerism) are intimately connected with people’s embodied experiences of travel through space along paths, roads, or ways. This is evident from a) the coherent way in which sentences including these terms are generally structured, b) the differences between path- road-, and way-sentences at a more specific level of abstraction, and c) the similarities between non-metaphorical and metaphorical sentences including the same term (e.g. non-metaphorical path and metaphorical path). The image-schematic structures of these experiences create coherence in word use. Differences between paths, roads, and ways, and hence between journeys along these, lead to variation in spatial metaphorical meaning.
This article presents a study on the time course of the acquisition of comparison constructions. The order in which comparison constructions (comparatives, measure phrases, superlatives, degree questions, etc.) show up in English- and German-learning children’s spontaneous speech is quite fixed. It is shown to be insufficiently determined by factors like frequency. Instead, a model of parametric variation in the grammar of comparison is shown to predict the order we observe.
We use the Google Ngram database, a corpus of 5,195,769 digitized books containing ~4% of all books ever published, to test three ideas that are hypothesized to account for linguistic generalizations: verbal semantics, pre-emption and skew. Using 828,813 tokens of un-forms as a test case for these mechanisms, we found verbal semantics was a good predictor of the frequency of un-forms in the English language over the past 200 years—both in terms of how the frequency changed over time and their frequency rank. We did not find strong evidence for the direct competition of un-forms and their top pre-emptors, however the skew of the un-construction competitors was inversely correlated with the acceptability of the un-form. We suggest a cognitive explanation for this, namely, that the more the set of relevant pre-emptors is skewed then the more easily it is retrieved from memory. This suggests that it is not just the frequency of pre-emptive forms that must be taken into account when trying to explain usage patterns but their skew as well.
Recent semantic studies show that adjectives differ in terms of the scalar structures associated with them, which has implications for patterns of degree modification. For example, relative adjectives in Dutch are associated with unbounded (open) scales and are, therefore, incompatible with maximizing adverbs (e.g. #helemaal groot ‘completely big’, #helemaal klein ‘completely small’). This paper tests the hypothesis that children acquire the relevant distinctions in the domain of boundedness in a piecemeal fashion by storing ready-made modifier-adjective pairings from the input and later generalizing over them. The results of the longitudinal corpus study of four degree adverbs in the spontaneous speech of nine children acquiring Netherlandic Dutch are consistent with the idea that language learners start by reproducing target-like modifier-adjective combinations stored as prefabs from the input. Once a critical mass of such adverb-adjective pairings has been stored, children make generalizations over the stored instances and proceed to productive use. This phase is marked by over-generalization errors that are attested, on average, six months after the emergence of a degree adverb. Most of the over-generalization errors involved combining a degree adverb with an adjective of an incompatible scalar structure. It is concluded that the acquisition of boundedness has a more protracted time course than has been hitherto assumed on the basis of comprehension experiments.
Adult number representations can belong to either of two types. One is discrete, language-specific, and culturally-derived; the other is analog and language-independent. Quantitative evidence is presented to demonstrate that analog number representations are adult-like in young children. Five- to 7-year-olds accurately estimated rapidly presented groups of 5--11 items. Groups were presented in random order and random arrangements controlling for overall area. Children's data were qualitatively, and to some degree quantitatively, similar to adult data with one exception: the ratio of the standard deviation of estimates to mean estimates decreased with age.
Two experiments investigated the acquisition of English comparative adjective forms, Adj + er and more Adj. In Experiment 1, 72 children, four- and seven-years-old, indicated their preferences for the synthetic or periphrastic comparative form for 16 adjectives in a forced-choice judgement task; their responses were compared to those of a group of adults (Graziano-King, 2003). In Experiment 2, a group of 29 children, ranging in age from 5;1 to 10;9, and a group of 11 adults performed a forced-choice judgement task, similar to that of Experiment 1, and an elicited production task, responding to the same 32 adjectives for both tasks. The two studies together support an acquisition trajectory of three stages. In the first stage, children show no preference for either form of the comparative; in the second, they adopt a suffixation rule; and in the third, they abandon the general rule and become conservative learners, eventually reaching the adult target.
In an attempt to clarify the role of nonlinguistic preferences in children's responses to the words more and less, children 3–4 years of age were administered three tasks. Two of these required the child to indicate which of two arrays had more or less items, as instructed; the third task required the child to point to any one of two arrays. Children consistently selected the arrays with more items on all three tasks. The present finding of a response bias necessitates a reinterpretation of earlier studies of more and less. The results are discussed in terms of the full and partial semantics hypotheses as articulated by E. Clark.
The 'simple' and 'intensive' hypotheses for X-er and too X are re- examined with data from children's spontaneous speech. Although the data to some extent support these hypotheses, they provide evidence that children's uses of X-er and too X extend beyond simple and intensive uses and indicate that these forms do not MEAN 'X' or 'very X' for young children. The data are best explained by drawing on two theories that have been proposed in work on the acquisition of word meanings: the Haphazard Examples Hypothesis and the theory of acquisition with a prototype.
32 3-4 yr old children were asked to indicate "Which one has less?" in 4 different contexts. Results indicate that performance was the same in all contexts indicating that "more" is acquired before "less" and that those children who do not know "less" treat it as a synonym of "more." Differing results of previous studies cannot be attributed to the type of materials to which the comparative judgments are applied. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
An experiment on children between 2; 0 and 7; 0 showed that they initially interpret the same X to mean ‘same kind’ in contexts where it actually means ‘same one’. This led to a critical evaluation of Piaget's implicit contention that young children are using determiners anaphorically. Stress is placed on the linguistic rather than conceptual component of children's behaviour in experiments involving questions of the type: Is it the same X? It is argued that language is not only the tool of intelligence for representing ongoing cognitive development, but that it is also a problem area for children within its own right. It is suggested that the importance of young children's processing procedures on the linguistic environment has hitherto been underestimated in Piaget's interactive epistemology.
Subjects aged 3;6–9;0 were asked to judge sentences in which much and many modified prototypical and non-prototypical mass and count nouns, and to correct those sentences judged to be deviant. The experimental results indicate that children do not approach the co-occurrence conditions of much and many with various nouns from a semantic point of view, but rather from a morphosyntactic or surface-distributional one. Children learn the proper form that the noun must take in these constructions before they learn the proper choice of quantifier. In addition, they reserve many for use with plural count nouns long before they learn that much is restricted in direct noun modification to use with singular mass nouns.
This chapter focuses on of the knowledge that one has to have about a word to use it appropriately. From the developmental point of view, what the child knows about the meaning of a word needs to be found in addition to the way in which this knowledge changes during the language acquisition process. The semantic feature hypothesis assumed that the meanings of words are made up of features or components of meaning and proposed that children learn word meanings gradually by adding more features to their lexical entries. The general predictions made by this theory have been shown to be remarkably consistent with data from several different sources in the literature on children's language. The theory contains a number of lacunae that future work will have to fill. For example, there is no account of the internal structure or lack of it in the child's earliest lexical entries. To study language acquisition properly, semantics cannot be ignored, for it is essential to know what the children means by what they says, and to know how they understand what they hear.
This study was designed to determine whether the asymmetry in children's acquisition of polar adjective pairs is based on linguistic factors related to differences in adult usage and frequency or on an underlying conceptual difference. 24 children, aged 3;7–4;11, took part in a concept-learning task in which nonsense syllables replaced English words for the positive and negative ends of four dimensions: size, height, length, and thickness. The data indicate that the syllables for the negative end of each dimension have a longer learning period and a greater prelearning error rate. These results support the hypothesis that the asymmetry observed in the acquisition of polar adjectives is based on an underlying conceptual asymmetry.
While the young child's difficulties in correctly comprehending the term less are well known, it appears less widely recognized that young children may also encounter difficulties with the term more. The present study shows that in a task which requires judgments about more to be based on the relative numerosity of sets, 3–4-year-old children may base their judgments on other parameters, such as the extent to which the sets are homogenous with respect to the color of their components. The implications of such findings are briefly considered.
5-, 4-, and 3-year-old children's comprehension of "less" was assessed in a variety of task contexts. The purpose was (a) to distinguish between incorrect and opposite (e. g., "more") interpretations of "less," and (b) to investigate the influence of contextual/procedural factors on children's comprehension of "less." There was no evidence of a "less is more" phenomenon at any age: failure to comprehend "less" resulted in chance-level performance. Several potential contextual facilitators of correct "less" judgments were suggested by differences across tasks in children's performance.
61 children in grades 1, 2, and 3 in rural county schools were compared on their semantic differential judgments of relational terms used in assessing conservation. Concrete and abstract scales were used to judge the quantitative terms "more" and "less" and the qualitative terms "same" and "different." The children were grouped according to Piaget's 3 levels of conservation development. It was found that Logical Conservers were able to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative differences better than either Intuitive Conservers or Nonconservers, and that there was an apparent developmental progression in the use of these terms reflecting Piaget's stages of conservation attainment. Thus, it appears that conservation status and the ability to use relational terms are related.
Children aged from 3.5 to 5.5 years were tested on their comprehension of the terms taller, shorter, more, and less in five types of sentences: truncated, explicit standard, expanded explicit standard, two-dimensional second-clause subject noun, and two-dimensional second-clause subject pronoun. Many childen performed poorly on less and shorter in truncated sentences; the presence of explicit comparative cues did not improve these children's performance. Children who performed perfectly on truncated sentences still had difficulty understanding two-dimensional comparisons, especially those with a second-clause subject pronoun. These children interpreted only the first clause of the second-clause subject pronoun sentences. The results suggest that many children are capable of understanding two-dimensional comparisons, but perform poorly on the second-clause subject pronoun sentences because of uncertainty about the referent of the pronoun.
This study explores factors other than the concept of comparison which influence the learning of specific comparative adjective forms, namely, (a) the nature of the perceptual input, and (b) the nature of the event. Thirty subjects, age 4; 5 to 7; 9, were asked to describe objects reflecting various attribute differences in both multiple-object comparison and single-object, dynamic-change tasks. Children used comparative adjectives to talk about dynamic changes prior to static comparisons, and attributes based on visual or tactile input were easier than those based on both. These results are interpreted as indicating that perceptual cue redundancy and heterogeneity affects the learning of attribute dimensions, and that children first use the -er suffix in a non-comparative sense.
Children aged 2;6–4;0 were asked questions containing comparative and superlative forms of adjectives from pairs designated as unmarked/marked or simply positive/negative. Children's answers required a choice of one out of five objects. Differences in frequency of correct responses were generally greater between unmarked/marked pairs than between simple positive/negative pairs, but the response of ‘greatest extent’ to marked adjective questions was seldom a significantly common error. Linguistic arguments for the unmarked/marked distinction in comparative adjectives are reviewed, and it is concluded that there is no linguistic or behavioural evidence for a marking explanation of children's difficulty with ‘marked’ comparative adjectives.
Studies of comprehension of the quantifiers all and more are reported. The subjects were children between the ages of three and five. There were two main conditions. In one of these the objects to which the quantifiers related were enclosed in containers which either were or were not filled by the objects. In the other no containers were present. These conditions yielded substantially different response patterns. The relation of the findings to those typically obtained from Piagetian conservation tasks is discussed; and the implications for theories of semantic development are considered.
Two tasks were used to test predictions of the Semantic Feature Hypothesis (SFH) about children's comprehension of the meaning of spatial adjectives. Our data support SFH predictions about the order of acquisition for dimensional features: more general features are acquired first. Predictions about polarity, however, were not supported: our data show that children do not acquire [+ pol] features prior to their [− pol] counterparts. Type of task made no difference in children's comprehension of [+ pol] terms but did affect comprehension of [− pol] terms. To account for this pattern of results, an acquisition hypothesis is offered which, contrary to the SFH, proposes that polar features are acquired prior to dimensionality and that semantic features may be added quite independently to [+ pol] and [− pol] terms.
Twenty-eight children (mean age 4.3 yr) were tested for comprehension of spatial antonym pairs with arrays which contained four objects representing both members of two antonym pairs. The results showed that: (a) the most common error was to point to an object representing the same polarity (marked-unmarked) as the word requested; (b) there was not a high degree of confusion within antonym paris; (c) unmarked antonyms tend to be acquired before marked antonyms; and (d) the order of acquisition of the pairs was: tall-short, long-short, high-low, thick-thin, deep-shallow, wide-narrow. The results were interpreted as supporting a modified semantic-feature hypothesis, in which polarity is acquired before dimension.
The present study proposes that children's apparent comprehension of certain words is at first dependent on a combination of their linguistic hypotheses about a word's meaning and certain non-linguistic strategies. Children aged 1;6-5;0 were given instructions requiring comprehension of the locative terms in, on and under. The results showed that children go through three stages: At first, they consistently use certain non-linguistic strategies that can be characterized by two ordered rules; next, they apply these rules to only one or two of the locative instructions; and finally, they exhibit full semantic knowledge of the three word meanings. Because of these non-linguistic strategies, the younger children always appear to understand in correctly, sometimes appear to understand on and never understand under. It is argued, nevertheless, that these non-linguistic strategies determine the order of acquisition of the three locative terms.
More and less were analyzed into two meaning dimensions, “occurrence” (derived from children's early language) and “quantity,” which were hypothesized to be developmentally related to acts of addition and subtraction. Two experiments tested 2- and 3-yr-old's comprehension of these concepts when initially equal or unequal rows were added to, subtracted from or left static. Addition and subtraction had little effect on Ss′ comprehension of either term. Two-year-old Ss understood more when differences in the number of objects in the array were relatively large, suggesting “many” as an intermediate stage of meaning for more. Three-year-olds understood less first as “smaller in amount,” not as more as others have found. Less was acquired later than more, a difference possibly due to its relatively restricted meaning and use or to its converse perceptual and logical relation to more.
Children in the age range from three to seven were tested in two experiments for their comprehension of the terms more and less. The findings of Donaldson and Balfour (1968) were replicated for both discrete and continuous substances and it was observed that even at age seven some children have not yet differentiated these two terms. Semantic differential ratings by the children gave independent support for these findings. The results were discussed in terms of general cognitive development and conservation tasks.
The acquisition of verb meaning is very different from the acquisition of simple noun meaning. ("Simple nouns" comprise concrete nouns and proper nouns.) Verbs are slower to be acquired than simple nouns. Verbs are used by children and adults with greater breadth of application than simple nouns. Finally, a componential account of meaning appears to fit the acquisition of verb meaning somewhat better than it does that of simple nouns. These differences reflect an important difference in the kind of meaning conveyed by verbs and simple nouns. Simple nouns refer to real-world entities, and verbs convey relationships among entities.
Proefschrift Kansas, Kan., University of Kansas. Met lit.opg.
Thesis--University of Kansas, Linguistics. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 337-343).
Two experiments are reported in each of which eighty children between the ages of two and six years of age were given a series of commands containing relational terms and similar commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. The results indicated that children are able to use information from a number of sources which help them to interpret such commands. Younger children, particularly, seemed to rely relatively little upon word meaning, per se. Evidence is offered that the children's responses were constrained by the non-linguistic context, by prior repetition of commands, and by information available from the linguistic context.
Kindergarteners, grouped according to number conservation ability, were asked to explain their choices of more and less in a series of parallel tasks requiring comparative judgements of continuous quantities. Errors on less tasks, as well as correct choices of more, were often determined by the non-linguistic strategy of choosing the greater amount. Non-conservers were more likely than conservers or transitional conservers to rely on this strategy. Furthermore, mature semantic knowledge of more was found to precede the development of a similar understanding of less. Non-conservers were less likely than conservers or transitionals to have a mature understanding of either term.
Language development: Form andfimction in emerging grammars One word at a time: The use of single word utterances before syntax
- L M Bloom
Bloom, L. M. (1970). Language development: Form andfimction in emerging grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloom, L. M. (1973). One word at a time: The use of single word utterances before syntax. The Hague: Mouton.
The acquisition of word meaning: An investigation of some current conflicts The development of communication: Social andpragmatic factors in language acquisition
- M Bowerman
Bowerman, M. (1978). The acquisition of word meaning: An investigation of some current conflicts. In N. Waterson & C. Snow (Eds.), The development of communication: Social andpragmatic factors in language acquisition (pp. 263-287). New York: Wiley.
Piaget's theory of intelligence
- C J Brainerd
Brainerd, C. J. (1978). Piaget's theory of intelligence. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Less may never mean more Recent advances in the psychology of language: Language development and mother-child interaction (pp. 109-131) The child as word learner
- S Carey
Carey, S. (1978a). Less may never mean more. In R. N. Campbell & P. T. Smith (Eds.), Recent advances in the psychology of language: Language development and mother-child interaction (pp. 109-131). New York: Plenum. Carey. S. (1978b). The child as word learner. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. Miller (Eds.), Linguisiic rheory and psychological reality (pp. 269-293). Cambridge, MA: MIT Pess.
Knowledge, context and strategy in the acquisition of meaning
- Clark
The primitive nature of children's relational concepts
- Clark
Less is not more: Further observations
- Trehub
Less may never mean more
- Carey