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A little goes a long way: evidence for a perceptual basis of learning for the noun categories COUNT and Mass*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Leslie Maggie Perrin McPherson
Leslie Maggie Perrin McPherson*
Affiliation:
McGill University
*
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Stewart Biological Sciences Building, 1205 Avenue Docteur Penfield, Montréal, Québec, H3A 1B1, Canada.
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Abstract

Various theories of learning for the categories COUNT NOUN and MASS NOUN are compared. It is argued that children assign words to these categories on the basis of intuitions arising from perception that are relevant to Macnamara's (1986) semantic definitions of the categories. These definitions rest on the centrality of identity in the meaning of nouns and the centrality of individuation in the meaning of count nouns but not mass nouns. Empirical evidence is presented that supports the hypothesis that young children classify words as count nouns or mass nouns on the basis of perceptual information about the extension of the words, that is, whether or not the extension consists exclusively of enduring individuals whose discreteness from one another is perceptually salient (count nouns) or not (mass nouns). In an experiment, 48 children with a mean age of 2;10 (S.D. = 0;5) were taught a word for a kind of object (i.e. a perceptually distinct individual) or for a kind of substance (i.e. a collection of small granules). For some children the word was syntactically COUNT and for others it was syntactically MASS. Half of the children received incongruous perceptual and syntactic cues. For most of these children, classification of the word was guided by the object- or substance-like appearance of the stimulus despite the presence of incongruent syntactic cues. Syntactic cues influenced classification of the word for a minority of subjects, most of whom were among the oldest in the sample. It is concluded that perceptual information is critical in early decisions about membership in the categories COUNT NOUN and MASS NOUN.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 315 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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Footnotes

*

This article is based on a Master's thesis done in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. I thank John Macnamara for extensive discussion about the ideas in this article and many useful suggestions for improving the manuscript. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for thoughtful comments, I am greatly indebted to Boel Nilsson for her good-natured dedication in helping me to solicit and run subjects. Her assistance greatly facilitated the process. I also thank Paul Bloom and Laura Petitto for valuable suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the staff, parents, and children of the following institutions for their gracious co-operation: Big Step Day Care Center, Family Play Group Cooperative, McGill Community Family Centre, Garderie Narnia, Parents-Children Drop-In Centre Cooperative, Royal Victoria Hospital Day Care Center, Small Wishes Nursery, Snowdon Tottlers Day Nursery, and the Westmount YMCA. The research reported here was supported by a McGill University Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research grant to John Macnamara on behalf of the author. Preparation of this article was facilitated by support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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