Meaning matters in children’s plural productions

Abstract

The English plural is about the number of individuals in a set of like kinds. Two year old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from two-year old children for sets of size two and four and for instances of basic level categories that were either similar or identical. Children were much more likely to produce the plural of these well-known nouns when there were four rather than two and when the instances were identical rather than merely similar. The results provide new evidence on children's acquisition of the English plural, showing that children's early productions are not just limited by knowledge of the noun and its plural form but also is limited by properties of the labeled sets in ways that are relevant to the underlying meaning of the plural.Two-year-old children learning English spontaneously produce the plural forms of nouns, using them to label sets containing multiple instances of the same kind. However, they do not use the plural in all required contexts (Cazden, 1968; Mervis & Johnson, 1991;Brown, 1973;Berko, 1958). Past explanations of this limited productivity have focused on morphological rules, exceptions to those rules, and phonological constraints (Marcus et al., 1992;Marchman, Plunkett, & Goodman, 1997;Winitz, Sanders & Kort, 1981). The meaning of the plural, however, has not been studied in relation to its growing productivity. This report presents new evidence that meaning matters.Formally, the English plural partitions sets into those with precisely one individual versus those with more than one. Although this seems natural to mature English speakers, other meaning distinctions are possible. For example, the Russian plural distinguishes sets of one, sets with few members, and sets with many members. Many Indo-European languages have a separate plural form for sets of exactly size two. Sursurunga, an Austrongesian language, has five plural forms that are dependent on the number of instances in the referred to set. Other languages such as Japanese have no plural but quantify sets through the use of quantifiers that depend on the kind of thing in the set. These cross-linguistic differences mean that learners have to figure out the relevant meaning categories for their language. This paper examines two factors that might be relevant to young children's figuring out the meaning of the English plural: the similarity of the instances in the set and the number of things in a set.Address for correspondence: Jennifer A. Zapf, Indiana University, Department of Psychology, 1101 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, E-mail: jenzapf@indiana.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and ...

La Influencia del Número de Objetos y las Claves Verbales en la Distinción Temprana del Plural

“…Esta dificultad disminuye conforme aumenta el número de objetos a 4, 6 y hasta 8 en un conjunto (Barner et al, 2011;Zapf & Smith, 2008). Resulta plausible que la dificultad en la producción de la terminación del plural ante un conjunto pequeño de objetos (Barner et al, 2011;Zapf & Smith, 2008) tenga sus orígenes en la comprensión del plural, la cual, como demuestran los resultados aquí mostrados, también se ve afectada ante conjuntos con pocos elementos y ante la presencia de marcos sintácticos simples. La dificultad en ambas modalidades implica que un conjunto de 2 elementos no es un representante ideal del plural, al menos a los dos años de vida; no obstante, esta dificultad puede ser disminuida cuando se proporcionan claves verbales reiterativas de número gramatical como es el caso del Experimento 1 del presente trabajo.…”

“…Otro factor relevante en la distinción del plural, además de las claves verbales proporcionadas, es el número de objetos presentados en un conjunto (Barner, Lui, & Zapf, 2011;Zapf & Smith, 2008). Zapf y Smith (2008) realizaron un estudio para explorar la producción del plural con niños de 24 meses aprendices del inglés, en el cual se indujo la producción del plural en conjuntos de 2 vs. 4 objetos, y de objetos idénticos (p.…”

“…32, nº 3 (octubre) la mayoría se han realizado con niños aprendices del inglés (Barner et al, 2011;Zapf & Smith, 2008). Dado que la comprensión precede a la producción en el desarrollo del lenguaje, puede ser un indicador más sensible sobre el procesamiento temprano del número gramatical que la producción verbal (Golinkoff & Hirsch-Pasek, 2001;Peña-Garay, 2005).…”

“…La diferencia primordial entre estos experimentos y los de Arias-Trejo et al (2014) consiste en que en la presente investigación la imagen en plural estuvo constituida por 2 en lugar de 8 objetos con la finalidad de evaluar la influencia del número de objetos en la comprensión temprana del plural. Esta diferencia implica, de acuerdo con la literatura (Wood et al, 2009;Zapf & Smith, 2008), un escenario de mayor dificultad para los infantes, dado que la distancia entre 8 y 1 es mayor que entre 2 y 1. Aunado a esto, se exploró la comprensión de la distinción entre el singular y el plural por medio de claves verbales múltiples (p.…”

Examination of the Locus of Positional Effects on Children's Production of Plural –s : Considerations From Local and Global Speech Planning

“…The current work considers this issue, focusing on variability in the production of grammatical morphemes that are inflected on lexical forms, such as plural -s. There is a growing body of literature indicating that variability in morpheme production is systematically related to semantic, phonological, articulatory, and higherlevel planning factors. Consider the contribution of semantic knowledge: The plural morpheme is more often produced when children are asked to label a set of objects that are highly similar in appearance versus a set of objects that are very distinct (Zapf & Smith, 2008). In terms of phonology, grammatical morphemes are produced more reliably in contexts that form a simple coda (e.g., flies) versus a cluster coda (e.g., drives ;Song, Sundara, & Demuth, 2009).…”