More and more and more about more

Three experiments explored the development of three linguistic aspects of more in children's speech. Subjects were 56 children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. Experiment 1 addressed the nature of the early semantic content of more. Experiment 2 examined the child's differentiation of mass more from count more. Experiment 3 explored the child's use of more as a comparative marker on adjectives. The results suggest, first, that the child initially stores the meaning of more with a prototype, rather than with some more systematic, featural representation. In addition, children's linguistic understanding of the dual use of more as a quantifier of mass amounts and count amounts does not appear to develop until long after they have been using more appropriately in unambiguous contexts. Finally, children learn to use more as a marker on comparatives only after they have acquired -er as a comparative marker, and some time after they have been using more successfully in nonadjectival constructions.