The Role of Cardinality in the Interpretation of Measurement Expressions

Abstract

The purpose of this brief article is to investigate four-year-olds' interpretation of attributive measure phrases (MPs), such as 3-pound, and the role of cardinality in mediating children's responses. In two experiments, I demonstrate that children at this age are starting to recognize that such MPs refer to a property of an individual, such as weight per unit (rather than the weight of an entire collection). Accordingly, they distinguish between attributive and pseudopartitive MPs. However, when the opportunity presents itself to treat the number word as referring to the cardinality of a set, some children succumb to this pressure, deviating from adult-like responses. I argue that the fundamental aspect of number word meaning that children take the first few years of life to master—that number words denote exact cardinality of a set of discrete objects—is precisely the aspect they must overcome when interpreting these MPs. However, the evidence shows that four-year-olds are well on their way to doing so.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research benefited from insightful comments and helpful suggestions from two anonymous reviewers, patient editing from Associate Editor Kamil Ud Deen, and discussions with Roger Schwarzschild, Rochel Gelman, and Julien Musolino. I am grateful for funding from an NRSA postdoctoral fellowship award HD057699 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development and a postdoctoral fellowship through the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Hannah Baker and Ariana Kalkstein provided invaluable research assistance. Preliminary versions of parts of this research were presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the 2010 Boston University Conference on Language Development. This work would not have been possible without the children, parents, and staff at Pennington Presbyterian Nursery School and the Douglass Psychology Child Study Center at Rutgers University.