Effect of number and similarity on children’s plural comprehension

Lanter, Jennifer; Basche, Richard A.

doi:10.1177/0142723714560177

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Even though children’s limitations in comprehending the grammatical marking of number have been described some time ago (Kenney & Wolfe, 1972), the amount of available research on this topic is limited but growing (e.g. Aljenaie, Abdalla, & Farghal, 2011; Arias-Trejo, Abreu-Mendoza, & Aguado-Servín, 2014; Arias-Trejo, Cantrell, Smith, & Canto, 2014; Lanter & Basche, 2014). The present article reports on studies that used a new language and larger samples than previous research, and provides converging evidence that children’s comprehension is indeed limited.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension of verb number morphemes in Czech children: Singular and plural show different relations to age and vocabulary

Šmolík

Bláhová

2016

First Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Two experiments examined Czech children's comprehension of grammatical number marking in verbs. Children were presented with picture pairs involving one or multiple participants in the same action, and were asked to point to the picture described by a recorded sentence. Experiment 1 (N = 72, age 3;0-4;7) tested four types of sentences, some of which marked the number of participants on the verb only. There was a marked increase in comprehension scores with age and receptive vocabulary scores in singular, but not in plural sentences. This pattern was present regardless of how number was marked. Experiment 2 (N = 45, age 3;4-4;9) replicated the key findings of Experiment 1. The results suggest that comprehension of morphological number markers remains difficult even when children routinely produce such markers. However, when compared with results from other languages and experimental paradigms, it appears that the effect is due mainly to children's comprehension of the task and not limitations in their grammatical knowledge.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension of verb number morphemes in Czech children: Singular and plural show different relations to age and vocabulary

Šmolík

Bláhová

2016

First Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Effects of education on the production of plural morphology among bilingual speakers of Yucatec Maya and Spanish

Butler

Pool

2017

LAB

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Yucatec Maya differs from many better-known languages in that it has optional plural marking. In a psycholinguistic study of the production of optional plural marking with college-enrolled speakers of Yucatec Maya, Butler, Jaeger, and Bohnemeyer (2014) found that conceptual number information influences the production of optional plural marking. Since the participants in the Butler et al. (2014) study are not necessarily representative of speakers of Yucatec Maya, we examine the effects of conceptual number information, via the manipulation of set size, while factoring in the effects of age, education and language use variables on the production of optional plural morphology among bilingual speakers of Yucatec Maya and Spanish speaking in Yucatec Maya. In addition to finding effects of conceptual information, we found that education, but not age, significantly influences the production of plural morphology in Yucatec Maya. Participants with higher levels of education were more sensitive to conceptual number information.

show abstract

Conceptual Factors Influence Children's Distributivity Bias

Patson

Hupp

2018

The Journal of General Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sentences such as "The girls read a book" can lead to multiple interpretations: They could be reading the same book (collective) or they could each be reading their own book (distributive). In ambiguous contexts, adults prefer the collective interpretation, and preschool children show a slight bias for a distributive interpretation. The current research investigated whether conceptual factors (number of actors) influences interpretations of these kinds of predicates. The data with children show a stronger collective bias when there are four actors compared to two actors. This may be because children are more likely to conceptualize groups of four (vs. two) as sets rather than collections of individuals. These data are discussed with reference to research on visual and conceptual integration abilities, showing that children lag behind in their ability to combine components into a whole in comparison to parsing objects into their component parts.

show abstract

Effect of number and similarity on children’s plural comprehension

Cited by 3 publications

References 20 publications

Comprehension of verb number morphemes in Czech children: Singular and plural show different relations to age and vocabulary

Comprehension of verb number morphemes in Czech children: Singular and plural show different relations to age and vocabulary

Effects of education on the production of plural morphology among bilingual speakers of Yucatec Maya and Spanish

Conceptual Factors Influence Children's Distributivity Bias

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About