Inferences about the meanings of nouns: The relationship between perception and syntax

Abstract

This experiment assessed the role of count/mass syntax in the acquisition of object words and substance words by 2- and 2 1 2 -year-olds. Unfamiliar objects were labelled with mass nouns and unfamiliar substances were labelled with count nouns. It was found that there was a subgroup of 2-year-olds who did not yet produce count/mass syntax and were not sensitive to it in the word-learning task, but who nonetheless distinguished objects from substances. From this result it was argued that children do not learn to make the distinction between objects and substances through the count/mass distinction, in contrast to claims by Quine (1969). The other 2-year-olds and the 2 1 2 -year-olds were affected by the syntactic information, especially on the substance trials. That is, when a substance was labelled by a new noun, the subcategorization of the noun influenced children's willingness to construe the referent as a token of a kind of pile (e.g., a puddle), rather than as a portion of a substance (e.g., some mud). It is argued that these children use syntactic information as well as perceptual information to form a construal of the referents of new words. It is also argued that the weight given to the syntactic information varies as a function of the ontological and quantificational properties of the referent.