Acquisition of English Number Marking: The Singular-Plural Distinction

Abstract

We present data from a preferential looking method to investigate when infants have mapped singular and plural markers in English onto the semantic distinction between singleton sets and sets with more than 1 individual. Twenty- to 36-month-old children heard sentences that marked number in 1 of 2 ways: (a) redundantly with verb morphology, lexical quantifiers, and noun morphology (“Look, there ARE SOME blicketS”/“Look, there IS A blicket”) or (b) only with noun morphology (“Look at the blicketS”/“Look at the blicket”). Twenty-four-month-old infants, but not 20-month-old infants, looked at the screen that matched the carrier sentence with respect to singular–plural distinction when number was expressed on the verb, on the noun, and with quantifiers. Detailed looking-time analyses suggest that the arrays begin to be differentiated on the child’s hearing are or is. Twenty-four-month-olds failed when number was marked on the noun alone, whereas 36-month-olds suc-Correspondence should be addressed to Sid Kouider, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et