| How are individuals and sets encoded in language? This study explored the relationship between individuation and mass-count syntax in three parts. The first part examined whether only count nouns can denote individuals, or whether certain mass nouns also individuate. In three experiments both adults and 4-year-old speakers of English based quantity judgments on number for all familiar count nouns (e.g., shoes), indicating that they individuate. However, for mass nouns subjects based judgments on both mass/volume (e.g., mustard, string), and number (e.g., furniture, mail, jewelry) indicating that mass syntax permits quantification over individuals, and thus that mass-count interpretation is asymmetric. The second part of the thesis examined whether this asymmetry in mass-count quantity judgments also exists for novel nouns. It also explored the relation between how words are extended (e.g., shape vs. substance) and how they quantify (e.g., number vs. volume) to determine whether quantification is rooted in low-level perceptual features of entities. Three-year-old children and adults based many quantity judgments on number for novel mass nouns that denoted solid objects. Also, differences in object complexity and solidity had a greater effect on quantity judgments for mass nouns than for count nouns, indicating that count syntax is less influenced by item specific semantics. Finally, although mass-count syntax had a significant effect on how both children and adults extended words, syntax had a significantly greater effect on quantity judgment than on word extension. The third part of the thesis examined when children first distinguish between singular and plural sets and how this relates to their acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax. Children first distinguished singular and plural sets, as such, at 22-months, and success (as measured by a manual search task) was driven by those children who had begun producing plural nouns in their speech. These studies suggest that count syntax has an important, but not unique, relation to individuals and sets in cognition, that mass syntax has no special interpretation, and that the distinction likely emerges at 22-months when children acquire the singular-plural distinction. |
