Mass is more: The conceiving of (un)countability and its encoding into language in 5-year-old-children

Abstract

Is the mass-count distinction merely a linguistic issue, or is it coded in representations other than language? We hypothesized that a difference between mass and count properties should be observed even in absence of linguistic distinctions driven by the morphosyntactic context. We tested 5-6-year-old children's ability to judge sentences with mass nouns (sand), count nouns (ring), and neutral nouns (i.e., those that appear in mass and count contexts with similar frequency; cake). Children refused neutral nouns embedded in uncountable morphosyntactic contexts, showing a preference for a count interpretation. This suggests that linguistic features alone are not sufficient to define the mass-count distinction. Additional analyses showed that children's performance with mass-but not count-morphosyntax correlated with their performance in tasks concerning logical and conservation operations. Altogether, these results suggest that the processing of mass features is not more demanding than count features from a linguistic point of view; rather, mass features entail additional abstraction abilities.Keywords Count/mass distinction . Language acquisition . Morphological number . Conservation operations . CountabilityTraditional grammar descriptions (after Cheng, 1973) trace a division between mass and count nouns. Specifically, mass nouns refer to substances (e.g., sand), a n d c o u n t n o u n s r e f e r t o o b j ec t s ( e . g . , r i n g ) . Morphosyntactic properties are crucial to distinguish between these two categories of nouns: Mass nouns do not take the plural (e.g., sands) and in the singular form cannot be modified by some determiners (e.g., a sand, each sand). Count nouns do have a plural form (e.g., rings) and in the singular form can be modified by those determiners (e.g., a ring, each ring).Even though the properties that distinguish mass from count nouns have been debated for a long time, both by philosophers (e.g., Pelletier, 1975Pelletier, , 2012Quine, 1960) and linguists (e.g., Allan, 1980;Bale & Barner, 2009;Gillon, 1992;Jackendoff, 1991), influential linguistic approaches (e.g., Borer, 2005;Chierchia, 1998Chierchia, , 2010De Belder, 2011) agree that m ass nouns (or mass morphosyntax) are formally simpler than count nouns (or count morphosyntax). The argument is that the computation of these latter requires more operations at the morphosyntactic level or at the semantic level. In fact, mass nouns can appear only in the singular (e.g., sand) while count nouns display a full inflection for number morphology (e.g., ring vs. rings). Even in the philosophical perspective advanced by Quine (1960), the mass interpretation would be the basic one from which the count interpretation derives.However, as already observed in many theoretical works (e.g., Allan, 1980;Pelletier, 2012;Rothstein, 2010), the simplicity of mass nouns as compared to count nouns in linguistics does not seem as straightforward in terms of cognition. The assumption that mass nouns (or mass morphosyntax) are formally simpler t...

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