Attention to Different Cues in Noun Learning: The Effect of English vs. Spanish Mass/Count Syntax

1. Introduction Children generalize nouns in ways that are consistent with the referent s ontological and/or grammatical kind. In other words, children generalize a new noun based on both the perceptual properties of the referent and the linguistic Cross-linguistic studies have shown that systematic differences in the structures of different languages are reflected in children s novel noun generalizations One of the differences that has been studied is the ontological object/substance distinction as it relates to the syntactic count/mass distinction. In this paper we look at the effect of mass/count syntax and perceptual cues concerning solidity on English-and Spanish-speaking children s generalization of new nouns. The task used to study this is the Novel Noun Extension Task. In this task, the child is shown an exemplar and the exemplar is labeled. The child is then asked what other things, matching the exemplar on different dimensions, can be called by the same name. Previous research has shown that children extend the name of a solid object to other objects of the same shape and the name of a nonsolid substance to other shapes made out of the same material. (Soja et al 1991). This object-substance distinction is at its core about discrete versus continuous quantities. Conceptually, objects are discrete and bounded unitary wholes. Substances, in contrast, are continuous unbounded masses. Thus a cup is an object, and what is the cup is the whole thing with its particular form. A smashed cup is not a cup. Water, however is a substance, continuous and unbounded. Any bit of water, in drops or in puddles, is water. Perceptually, solid things have bounded permanent shapes; nonsolid things are continuous masses with transient shapes. Thus, there is a relation between different solidities and the ontological kinds of object and substance. There is also a relation between count/mass syntax and the ontological object-substance distinction. In English, nouns are classified as either count or mass nouns. English count nouns such as cup and study obligatorily take the plural given multiple instances. Count nouns thus refer to entities conceptualized as discrete countable units-objects. Mass nouns such as water and justice do not take the plural but instead take continuous quantifiers such as