Quantity judgments and individuation: evidence that mass nouns count

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Semantics

Background:

• The mass-count distinction is a fundamental linguistic concept.
• Previous hypotheses suggested one-to-one mappings between syntax and semantics for mass and count nouns.
• Understanding this distinction is crucial for language acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the semantic properties of mass-count distinction in children and adults.
• To test the hypothesis that reference to individuals distinguishes count from mass nouns.
• To explore how syntactic context influences quantity judgments for mass-count flexible terms.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted involving quantity judgments.
• Participants included young children and adults.
• Substance-mass, count, object-mass, and mass-count flexible nouns were used in different syntactic contexts.

Main Results:

• Some mass nouns were found to quantify over individuals, similar to count nouns.
• Quantity judgments depended on number for count nouns and object-mass nouns, but on amount for substance-mass nouns.
• Mass-count flexible terms showed context-dependent judgments based on syntax (count vs. mass).

Conclusions:

• Reference to individuals does not solely distinguish count from mass nouns.
• The hypothesis of one-to-one syntactic-semantic mappings for mass-count distinction was not supported.
• Children may initially parse individual-referring words as count nouns during language acquisition.