The distinction be tween mass nouns and count nouns, first r emarked upon by Jespersen (1909, vol. 2, eh. 5.2) in connect ion with English, is found in a number of the world 's languages, including Chinese, Tamil, G e r m a n and French. In English, the most c o m m o n way to distinguish these two classes of words is syntactic. Cardinal numerals and quasi-cardinal numerals (e.g. , "severa l" )...

Theories of the mass-count distinction in linguistics, philosophy and psychology commonly argue that count nouns are distinguished from mass nouns by their reference to, and quantification over, individuals (e.g., Bloom, 1999; Wisniewski, Imai & Casey, 1996). We present experimental evidence that both children and adults interpret some mass nouns as quantifying over individuals, and suggest a m...

The issue of whether nouns in Mandarin Chinese can be distinguished into count and mass nouns has been debated in recent literature. Unlike English, Mandarin Chinese is a language where nouns are not obviously count nouns or mass nouns. In fact, syntactically nouns in Mandarin are similar to mass nouns in English, as they cannot combine directly with numerals, but must combine with classifiers;...

Some have proposed that speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, have to rely on classifiers for acquiring individuated meanings of nouns (e.g., Borer 2005; Lucy 1992). This paper examines this view by looking at how Mandarin adults interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in three experiments. Experiment 1 fou...

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 (Barne...

The present study addressed the question of whether count and mass nouns are differentially processed in the brain. In two different ERP (Event-Related Potentials) tasks we explored the semantic and syntactic levels of such distinction. Mass and count nouns typically differ in concreteness, hence the effect of this important variable was factorially examined in each task. Thus the stimuli prese...

Nouns may refer to countable objects such as tables, or to mass entities such as rice. The mass/count distinction has been discussed in terms of both semantic and syntactic features encoded in the mental lexicon. Here we show that event-related potentials (ERPs) can reflect the processing of such lexical features, even in the absence of any feature-related violations. We demonstrate that count ...