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A Broken Fork in the Hand is Worth Two in the Grammar: A Spatio-Temporal Bias in Children’s Interpretation of Quantifiers and Plural Nouns
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In: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/Proceedings/2008/pdfs/p1580.pdf
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Abstract:
We investigated the role of spatio-temporal and kind information in children’s early counting and quantification of sets. Previous studies report that children exhibit a spatio-temporal bias when counting, and count parts of broken objects as distinct individuals (Shipley & Shepperson, 1990). We explored whether this bias is restricted to counting, or reflects early linguistic set representations more generally. When tested with a quantity judgment task, nearly 75 % of 4-year-olds judged that an object broken in three – e.g., a broken fork – was more forks than two whole objects. In an elicitation task, we found that the bias is also present in children’s pluralization. Children labeled broken objects using plural morphology 30 % of the time (e.g., calling a broken fork “some forks”). These results indicate that a spatio-temporal bias exists for multiple forms of linguistic quantification. We suggest that children’s early set representations are defined over spatio-temporal individuals.
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Keyword:
kind-based individuation; quantity; spatio-temporal individuation
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URL: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/Proceedings/2008/pdfs/p1580.pdf
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.537.9171
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