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- Title
Mass is more: The conceiving of (un)countability and its encoding into language in 5-year-old-children.
- Authors
Zanini, Chiara; Benavides-Varela, Silvia; Lorusso, Riccardina; Franzon, Francesca
- 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.
- Subjects
COGNITION; LANGUAGE acquisition; GRAMMAR; LINGUISTICS; MORPHOSYNTAX
- Publication
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2017, Vol 24, Issue 4, p1330
- ISSN
1069-9384
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3758/s13423-016-1187-2