Abstract

We explored children’s early interpretation of numerals and linguisticnumber marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey, 2004) thatchildren’s initial distinction between one and other numerals (i.e., two,three, etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between singular andplural nouns. Previous studies have presented evidence that in languageswithout singular- plural morphology, like Japanese and Chinese, childrenacquire the meaning of the word one later than in singular-plural languageslike English and Russian. In two experiments, we sought to corroborate thisrelation between grammatical number and integer acquisition within English.We found a significant correlation between children’s comprehension ofnumerals and a large set of natural language quantifiers and determiners,even when controlling for effects due to age. However, we also found that2-year-old children, who are just acquiring singular-plural morphology andthe word one, fail to assign an exact interpretation to singular nounphrases (e.g., a banana), despite interpreting one as exact. For example,in a truth value judgment task, most children judged that a banana wasconsistent with a set of two objects, despite rejecting sets of two for thenumeral one. Also, children who gave exactly one object for singular nounsdid not have a better comprehension of numerals relative to children whodid not give exactly one. Thus, we conclude that the correlation betweenquantifier comprehension and numeral comprehension in children of this ageis not attributable to the singular-plural distinction facilitating theacquisition of the word one. We argue that quantifiers play a more generalrole in highlighting the semantic function of numerals, and that childrendistinguish between numerals and other quantifiers from the beginning,assigning exact interpretations only to numerals.

Related Organizations

University of Chicago
United States
University of Toronto
Canada
University of California, San Diego
United States

Keywords

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Finding one’s meaning: A test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development☆

Finding one’s meaning: A test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development☆

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