Cross-linguistic relations between quantifiers and numerals in language acquisition: Evidence from Japanese

Barner, David; Libenson, Amanda; Ansari, Daniel; Takasaki, Mayu

doi:10.31234/osf.io/cpv3s

Cited by 20 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(28 reference statements)

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“…The major difficulty for the nativist position is the fact that acquisition of number words (or numerals) by children takes a long time, completed only at the age of three and a half to four years. Experimental results documenting this protracted learning process have been replicated since Wynn's (1992) longitudinal study (Barner et al 2009;Le Corre & Carey 2007;Le Corre et al 2006;Sarnecka et al 2007). Gelman and Gallistel (1978) propose in their seminal work on children's numerical abilities that various innate principles underlie our ability to count.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…Sarnecka et al (2007) observe that Japanese children lag behind compared with English and Russian learners at an early stage of numeral acquisition, though Barner et al (2009) have shown that they soon catch up. As a possible factor that causes the initial delay, Barner et al point to the morphological complexity of numerals due to the presence of a classifier.…”

Section: Aspects Of Development Explainedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So this is a cross-linguistically persistent pattern, unaffected by cultural differences. The cut-off point that separates CP-knowers from the rest also seems to be cross-linguistically stable, marked by the first three or four numerals in the count list (Barner et al 2009;Le Corre et al 2016;Piantadosi et al 2014). Let us consider what the proposal presented in section 2.1 has to say about these aspects of numeral acquisition.…”

Section: Aspects Of Development Explainedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Natural language and set-theoretic conception of natural number

Watanabe

2017

Acta Linguistica Academica

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This article presents a new theory of simplex numerals that incorporates a slight revision of Chomsky's (2008) set-theoretic conception of natural number, which assumes that the notion of natural number is innate. The new theory makes it possible to account for the behavior of numerals in counting as well as the developmental stages that children go through in learning numerals. The key idea is that set-theoretic objects corresponding to natural number notions are subject to operations that apply when a syntactic object is converted to phonological form. These operations provide a crucial link that connects the meaning of a numeral with the count list consisting of numerals. A notable feature of the proposed analysis is that the Cardinal Principle is derived by recruiting linguistic computation and therefore is no longer stipulated as such.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Section: Aspects Of Development Explainedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Aspects Of Development Explainedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Natural language and set-theoretic conception of natural number

Watanabe

2017

Acta Linguistica Academica

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“…These number-knower levels are found in children acquiring number systems not only in English, but also in Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Slovenian, and even among the Tsimane', a farming and foraging society in rural Bolivia (Almoammer et al, 2013;Barner, Libenson, Cheung, & Takasaki, 2009;Li, Le Corre, Shui, Jia, & Carey, 2003;Piantadosi, Jara-Ettinger, & Gibson, 2014;Sarnecka, Kamenskaya, Yamana, Ogura, & Yudovina, 2007).…”

Section: Acquiring a System Of Representation For Exact Numbersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to represent exact numbers

Sarnecka

2015

Synthese

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This article focuses on how young children acquire concepts for exact, cardinal numbers (e.g., three, seven, two hundred, etc.). I believe that exact numbers are a conceptual structure that was invented by people, and that most children acquire gradually, over a period of months or years during early childhood. This article reviews studies that explore children's number knowledge at various points during this acquisition process. Most of these studies were done in my own lab, and assume the theoretical framework proposed by Carey (2009). In this framework, the counting list ('one,' 'two,' 'three,' etc.) and the counting routine (i.e., reciting the list and pointing to objects, one at a time) form a placeholder structure. Over time, the placeholder structure is gradually filled in with meaning to become a conceptual structure that allows the child to represent exact numbers (e.g., There are 24 children in my class, so I need to bring 24 cupcakes for the party.) A number system is a socially shared, structured set of symbols that pose a learning challenge for children. But once children have acquired a number system, it allows them to represent information (i.e., large, exact cardinal values) that they had no way of representing before.

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“…This account would need to explain why iota was maturationally delayed, when no such delay was observed with other complex logical representations like those associated with quantifiers like all (which emerge much earlier in acquisition; see Barner et al 2009aBarner et al , 2009b). In our view, an account that appeals to maturation has difficulty explaining differences in the acquisition trajectories of different logical forms, particularly when these representations are equivalently complex, frequent in language, and fundamental to linguistic meaning.…”

Section: Maturation Of Semantic or Conceptual Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring the Meaning of Free Relative Clauses and Plural Definite Descriptions

Caponigro¹,

Pearl²,

Brooks³

et al. 2016

Preprint

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Plural definite descriptions (e.g. the things on the plate) and free relative clauses (e.g. what is on the plate) have been argued to share the same semantic properties, despite their syntactic differences. Specifically, both have been argued to be non-quantificational expressions referring to the maximal element of a given set (e.g. the set of things on the contextually salient plate). We provide experimental support for this semantic analysis with the first reported simultaneous investigation of children's interpretation of both constructions, highlighting how experimental methods can inform semantic theory. A Truth-Value Judgment task and an Act-Out task show that children know that the two constructions differ from quantificational nominals (e.g. all the things on the plate) very early on (4 years old). Children also acquire the adult interpretation of both constructions at the same time, around 6-7 years old. This happens despite major differences in the frequency of these constructions, according to our corpus study of children's linguistic input. We discuss possible causes for this late emergence. We also argue that our experimental findings contribute to the recent theoretical debate on the correct semantic analysis of free relatives.

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Cross-linguistic relations between quantifiers and numerals in language acquisition: Evidence from Japanese

Cited by 20 publications

References 14 publications

Natural language and set-theoretic conception of natural number

Natural language and set-theoretic conception of natural number

Learning to represent exact numbers

Acquiring the Meaning of Free Relative Clauses and Plural Definite Descriptions

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