Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults
Name
context-sensitivity-and-the-semantics-of-count-nouns-in-the-evaluation-of-partial-objects-by-children-and-adults.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
815.56 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a790b4bed888e771c589d9fa1fc710ef
Author(s)
SYRETT, Kristen
Aravind, Athulya
Date Issued
2022
Journal
Journal of Child Language
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Citation
SYRETT, Kristen and ARAVIND, Athulya. 2022. "Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults." Journal of Child Language, 49 (2).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities in a given domain, or children cannot readily access relevant linguistic alternatives for the target count noun. We advance a new account, appealing to theoretical proposals about underspecification in nominal semantics and the role of the discourse context. Our results demonstrate that there are limits to which children allow partial objects to serve as wholes, and that under certain conditions, adult performance resembles that of children by allowing in partial objects. We propose that children's behavior is in fact licensed by the inherent context dependence of count nouns.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000921000027
