Parts and wholes in children’s understanding of plural expressions

Languages differentially mark whether reference is made to individuals (singulars) or to collections of individuals (plurals). While the core distinction is acquired early (e.g. Kouider et al., 2006; Barner et al., 2007), plural expressions introduce substantial additional semantic complexity in how atomic individuals contribute to their meanings (cf. Link, 1983; Schwarzschild, 1994). Here, I present three case studies that examine how children navigate this complexity.

The first study investigates cumulative vs. distributive readings of sentences containing multiple plural expressions (e.g. “Two girls have three balloons {each/together}”), which previous work has found children may not reliably distinguish (Pagliarini et al., 2012; Syrett & Musolino, 2013, a.o.). In our study, both interpretations of ambiguous sentences produced priming effects in children, implying that they indeed distinguish between those readings, but may struggle with the linguistic markers associated with them (e.g. “each”, “together”). The second study examines children’s acquisition of maximal interpretations of definite plurals (e.g. “John read the books” meaning “John read ALL of the books”). We found that preschoolers often accepted both maximal and non-maximal construals of definite plurals, suggesting that they do not consistently assign maximal interpretations to plural definites and raising questions about what underlies these difficulties. In the third study, we further explore the source of this flexibility by prompting children of the same age to consider maximal plural sets and proportions thereof using partitive constructions involving the non-maximality remover “all” and the proportional quantifier “half” (as in “all of the cookies” and “half of the cookies”). Here we observe clear improvements, in particular ceiling performance for “all”-quantified sentences, indicating that children are able to derive and distinguish maximal and non-maximal interpretations. Taken together these results suggest that although preschoolers continue to struggle with the semantic and pragmatic constraints associated with plural constructions, they are capable of deriving the relevant meaning distinctions well before their behavior reflects full competence.