Quantity judgments and individuation: evidence that mass nouns count.

TLDR: It is suggested that children learning language parse words that refer to individuals as count nouns unless given morpho-syntactic and referential evidence to the contrary are acquired, in which case object-mass nouns are acquired.

About: This article is published in Cognition.The article was published on 2005-08-01 and is currently open access. It has received 239 citations till now.

Figures

Figure 5. Percentage of flexible words interpreted as quantifying over individuals, when presented in count syntax versus mass syntax

Table 1. The semantic interpretation of mass nouns throughout development

Figure 4. Images depicting selected experiment from Experiment 3 (stone/s, string/s, paper/s).

Figure 2. Adults’ and children’s quantity judgments, as a percentage of judgments based on number of individuals.

Figure 6. Lexical and syntactic origins of individuation. Count syntax supplies the feature +individual (+IND), while mass syntax is unspecified for this feature (ØIND). Terms specified lexically as +IND (e.g. furniture) individuate in mass syntax, while lexical items lacking this feature (e.g. string) individuate only in count syntax.

Figure 3. Images of selected stimuli from Experiment 2 (object-mass: silverware; count: shoes; substance-mass: toothpaste).

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

In Experiments 1 and 2, the quantity judgments of participants provided evidence that some mass nouns refer to individuals, as such. These results suggest that some mass nouns quantify over individuals, and that therefore reference to individuals does not distinguish count nouns from mass nouns. Also, the authors suggest that children learning language parse words that refer to individuals as count nouns unless given morpho-syntactic and referential evidence to the contrary, in which case object-mass nouns are acquired.