Children ’ s sensitivity to semantic properties of the count-mass distinction?

1. Children’s sensitivity to semantic properties of the count-mass distinction? SHARON ARMON-LOTEMBar Ilan University Language, Culture and Mind University of Portsmouth, July 18-20

2. Cognitive distinctions Syntactic distinctions What do children know about nouns? Rote learned distinctions Semantic distinctions Pragmatic distinctions

3. Questions • What do children know about the semantics of nouns and the relations between them ? • What is rote learned and what is rule bound? • What is semantically universal and what is based on world knowledge?

4. The count - mass distinction • Things are counted • Substance is measured.

5. Syntactic distinctions (Chierchia 1998) • Countability: • desk/desks vs. furniture/*furnitures • four desksvs. *four furnitures • *four pieces of deskvs.four pieces of furniture

6. each bookvs.*each suger • Determiners and quantifiers sensitivity: • much sugarvs. *much book(s) • a lot of books vs. *a lot of book • a lot of sugar • some book(s), some sugar

7. Grammatical Distinctions  Intuitive Cognitive Distinctions • Near semantic synonyms within the same language: shoes, footware • Near semantic synonyms across languages English furniture and Hebrew rehitim

8. Gordon (1985) – Task 1 • Question: What do children rely on in making the count-mass distinction? • Syntactic information: a book, some water • Age: 3 -5 • Methodology: sentence completion with nonce words. Conflicting and complementary scenarios • Procedure: This is a/some garn, can you say garn? …. So, here we have a/some garn, over there we have more … what? • Findings: strong preference for syntactic information in all age groups.

9. But … • They rely on syntactic clues by the age of three, but what happens before? How do they learn these distinctions? • Maybe the results are because nonce words were used. So …

10. Gordon (1985) – Task 2 • Syntactic information: books, water • Age range: 2-5;9 • Methodology: elicitation task with real words. • Procedure: Paddington went shopping. He came to a furniture/toy store. Do you know what you get in a furniture/toy store? • Findings: Very low error rate even in conflicting settings, e.g., lettuce, furniture.

11. But ... • This looks like evidence for rote learning, not necessarily syntactic or semantic knowledge. • Do they have a semantic knowledge at all? • What do children know about the semantic properties of nouns? So …

12. Semantic definitions of count and mass (Link 1983) • Mass expressions are homogeneous. Count expressions are not. • Upward homogeneity (cumulativity): wine + wine = wine a dog + a dog = dogs/*a dog • Downward homogeneity: If I split wine into two parts each part is still wine. If I split a dog into two parts, each part is not a dog.

13. Homogeneity is not a linguistic distinction (Rothstein 2004( • Homogeneity is a real-world distinction. • The fact that half a dog is not a dog while half a quantity of wine is wine depends on what counts as a dog or as wine in the world. • So is the count mass distinction formal, or does it reflect the way things are in the world?

14. Count nouns can be homogeneous too (Rothstein 2004) • Fence, wall, hedgeare all homogeneous and count. • A fence can be broken into two fences: • Two fences can be put together into a single fence. • Rothstein 2004: homogeneous count nouns are a systematic part of the language and not odd exceptions (in contradistinction to Krifka 1992, Zucchi and White). • So [±homogeneous] is not at the basis of the count mass distinction.

15. Three categories of nouns • Mass nouns [-count] [+homogenous] • Count nouns [+count] [- homogenous]. • Some count predicates such as, fence and wall, are [+count] and [+homogenous]

16. What are children sensitive too? Are children sensitive to • World distinction [± homogeneous] • Formal distinction [± count] • Both

17. Methodology • Syntactic information: plural vs. singular • 20 children, age: 3 -5 + 10 Adults • Methodology: elicitation task with real words and objects. • Three semantic categories, which the two features yield. • Presentation: Mom went shopping. She put an apple in her basket, then another apple, and then another apple. What’s in the basket? What do we have here?

18. When is plural used? Figure 1 – The use of plural forms by different age groups (by percentage)

19. Findings • The Threes like the adults made a binary distinction based on world distinction. • Three of the Fives made a binary distinction based on the formal distinction. • Seven of the Fives followed the world distinction, but used other linguistic means to make the formal distinction, making a three-fold distinction.

20. How did the Five’s make the three-fold distinction? • Half of their responses included classifiers in order to make the formal distinction between ‘sugar’ and ‘fence’: Shalosh peamim xol three times sandshtey kosot mayimtwo cups water

21. Half of their responses included an adjective indicating the length of the row of objects in order to make the formal distinction between ‘sugar’ and ‘fence’: • srox arox • Shoelace long • sharsheret aruka • Chain long

22. Summary • The Threes go by the world distinction between things which are homogeneous and things which are not. • The Fives show awareness of the tension between the linguistic indicators and the non-linguistic ones. • The Fives form a syntactic distinction between the three semantic categories, even in ways which are atypical of their language, thus following the uniqueness principle (Wexler (1979), Pinker (1984)).

23. Conclusion • Both groups are highly sensitive world knowledge as manifested by the homogeneity of the targets • In the absence of linguistic input (which was available in Gordon’s tasks), younger children rely on world knowledge, i.e. making the cognitive distinctions. • Older children, however reveal awareness of the tension between real world, cognitive distinction and the formal, semantic distinctions.

24. Thank you