Mass is more: The conceiving of (un)countability and its encoding into language in 5-year-old-children.
Is the mass-count distinction merely a linguistic issue, or is it coded in representations other than language? We hypothesized that a difference between mass and count properties should be observed even in absence of linguistic distinctions driven by the morphosyntactic context. We tested 5-6-year-old children's ability to judge sentences with mass nouns (sand), count nouns (ring), and neutral nouns (i.e., those that appear in mass and count contexts with similar frequency; cake). Children refused neutral nouns embedded in uncountable morphosyntactic contexts, showing a preference for a count interpretation. This suggests that linguistic features alone are not sufficient to define the mass-count distinction. Additional analyses showed that children's performance with mass-but not count-morphosyntax correlated with their performance in tasks concerning logical and conservation operations. Altogether, these results suggest that the processing of mass features is not more demanding than count features from a linguistic point of view; rather, mass features entail additional abstraction abilities.
Department of Neuroscience DNS, University of Padova, Via Giustiniani 5, 35128, Padova, Italy.
Chiara
C
Zanini
Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization DPSS, University of Padova, Via Venezia 12/2, 35131, Padova, Italy.
Silvia
S
Benavides-Varela
Department of Neuroscience DNS, University of Padova, Via Giustiniani 5, 35128, Padova, Italy.
Riccardina
R
Lorusso
Department of Neuroscience DNS, University of Padova, Via Giustiniani 5, 35128, Padova, Italy. francescafranzon7@gmail.com.|Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies DiSLL, University of Padova, Piazzetta Folena 1, 35137, Padova, Italy. francescafranzon7@gmail.com.
Francesca
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0503-2792
F
Franzon
D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D055641:Mathematical Concepts
Conservation operations; Count/mass distinction; Countability; Language acquisition; Morphological number