Abstract
In English, a lexical distinction is drawn between the indefinite determiner “a” and the numeral “one”. English-speaking children also interpret the two terms differently, with an exact, upper bounded interpretation of the numeral “one”, but no upper bounded interpretation of the indefinite determiner “a”. Unlike English, however, German does not draw a distinction between the indefinite determiner and the numeral one but instead uses the same term “ein/e” to express both functions. To find out whether this cross-linguistic difference affects children’s upper bounded interpretation of “ein/e”, we tested German-speaking children and adults in a truth-value-judgment task and compared their performance to English-speaking children. Our results revealed that German-speaking children differed from both English children and German adults. Whereas the majority of German adults interpreted “ein/e” in an upper bounded way (i.e. as exactly one, not two), the majority of German-speaking children favored a non-upper bounded interpretation (thus accepting two as a valid response to “ein/e”). German-speaking children’s proportion of upper bounded responses to “ein/e” was also significantly lower than English children’s upper bounded responses to “one”. However, German children’s rate of upper bounded responses increased once a number-biasing context was provided. These findings suggest that German-speaking children can interpret “ein/e” in an upper bounded way but that they need additional cues in order to do so. When no such cues are present, German-speaking children differ from both German-speaking adults and from their English-speaking peers, demonstrating that cross-linguistic differences can affect the way speakers interpret numbers.
Highlights
In English, a lexical distinction is drawn between the indefinite determiner “a” and the numeral “one”
When compared to English-speaking children’s responses to the indefinite determiner a, there was no significant difference between German and English children’s acceptance rates of two tokens during the critical trial, (i.e. 78% of the English children vs. 89% of the German children), χ2(1) = 1.6, (Yates χ2(1) = 0.9), ns, φ = .15. These findings suggest that German children – unlike German adults – tend to interpret eine as an indefinite determiner rather than as a numeral
When evaluating German adults’ data as a baseline, our findings reveal that adult speakers of German interpreted eine in an exact, upper bounded way, comparable to English-speaking children’s interpretation of one
Summary
In English, a lexical distinction is drawn between the indefinite determiner “a” and the numeral “one”. While the Welsh language makes use of a highly regular counting system where numbers like twenty-one are expressed as ‘two tens one’, the English counting system is rather irregular (Dowker, Bala, & Lloyd, 2008; Dowker & Roberts, 2015) This crosslinguistic difference seems to affect children’s number skills. English-speaking children interpreted the numeral one but not the determiner a in an upper bounded way, suggesting that the lexical distinction between the two terms may aid children in deriving an exact interpretation of the number word one (as in exactly one, not two). Since German conflates the indefinite and numeral meaning of a and one in the same expression (i.e. ein/e) but uses a different form in a counting routine, German-speaking children may face more difficulties in assigning an exact, upper bounded meaning to this term than English children
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