Clark2009cnLx

One vs.
more than one: antecedents to plural marking in early language acquisition*

EVE V. CLARK AND TATIANA V. NIKITINA
Abstract When children rst mark distinctions in language, they may use semantically possible but nonconventional expressions. This can be seen in their initial attempts to express more-than-one in English (conventionally conveyed by use of the plural inection). We explore childrens earliest expressions for more-than-one by (a) examining longitudinal records for references to one vs. several objects, (b) eliciting references to pictures depicting one vs. two, three, or four objects, and (c) eliciting answers to whatvs. how many-questions about two or more objects. Longitudinal observations show that (1) the plural ending (-s) emerges piecemeal; and (2) children use numeral bare-stem nouns (two blanket) before conventional -s. We then elicited singular and plural expressions using pictures from 25 two- and three-year-olds. Most children used plural -s for only a few items; a number relied on numeral bare-stem forms (two duck); a few used quantiers like more, and a few iteration with pointing gestures (e.g., for three cats, cat POINT for each in turn). Knowledge of plural marking was distinct from knowledge of counting: Two-year-olds answered what questions with conventional or non-conventional plurals for up to nine objects, but managed how many-questions only for two or three, did poorly with four or ve, and typically failed to respond for six or more, consistent with ndings on the conceptual development of number.
1.
Introduction
When children start to learn a rst language, they have to discover which linguistic distinctions are made in each language and which forms are used to express those distinctions. Languages dier somewhat in precisely which grammatical and lexical distinctions are made. Some mark both aspect and tense on verbs, as in Polish, while others mark only tense
Linguistics 471 (2009), 103139 DOI 10.1515/LING.2009.004 00243949/09/00470103 6 Walter de Gruyter
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E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina
(Hebrew) or only aspect (Navaho). Some languages mark the gender of every noun in a two-gender system (e.g., masculine vs. feminine in French or common vs. neuter in Dutch) or in a three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter in German or Russian). Languages also distinguish given information from what is new, information known personally versus known by hearsay. They distinguish the roles played by the participants in events (e.g., agent, patient, recipient, instrument, location, or object-aected). And they distinguish one object or event from morethan-one. There is considerable overlap from one language to another in which distinctions are made, and also variation, both in the selections of distinctions by language and in the means used to convey each distinction (Bybee 1985; Corbett 2000; Haspelmath et al. 2005). One reason the same or similar distinctions turn up in many dierent languages is that they are salient conceptually, hence good candidates for linguistic expression (Langacker 1991). Grammatical distinctions based on such conceptual categories should be among the rst children try to express. But since not all distinctions appear in a specic language, children may sometimes assign a meaning to a form and later discover that the conventional form for this meaning is dierent, or even that there isnt one. Where grammatical distinctions receive complex expression (e.g., case, gender, tense, and aspect), children may at rst use a single form everywhere instead of the adult array of forms required (Slobin 1973). They may also initially misanalyze certain forms and assign them meanings that must later be revised. When young children extend a certain form or assign a nonconventional meaning to some forms, they provide evidence for some of the universal conceptual categories that underlie language, categories that are frequently obscured by language-specic conventions of expression (Clark and Carpenter 1989a: 24).
1.1.
Emergent categories
Emergent categories, then, are categories for which children try to nd some expression early in acquisition. Those that receive expression are robust in that language. Other linguistic distinctions may not receive any conventional expression, so even if children start out trying to express them, they must eventually give up. Where a distinction is marked in a language, children dont necessarily identify the relevant linguistic means from the start. They may choose some other semantically compatible form to convey a distinction, and only later discover the conventional form or forms. Researchers have identied several emergent categories to which children attempt to give linguistic expression early on, before
Antecedents to plural marking
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acquisition of the conventional devices used by adult speakers. They include childrens attempts to convey the notion of source, realized as the agent of an action or the natural force responsible, as in (1), or as the cause in cause-result sequences, as possessors, and as standards of comparison, as in (2): (1) Agents and natural forces: D (2;2.3), looking at a piece of sandwich hed pushed o his plate: This fall down from me. J (2;2), of a visit to the doctor: I took my temperature from the doctor, D (4;6.9), lling in on a story: Daddy, the pigs have been marooned from the rain. Cause, possession, and comparison: D (2;6.13), remembering an earlier event: Then I cried a bit from you go get him A (3;0): I see boats from Mommy. D (2;8.15), of his car seat: This seat is getting too small from me.
(2)
Children learning English adopt the preposition from, rst used for locative sources, to mark other sources as well, when these occur in nonsubject or noninitial position. Only later do these children learn the conventional system for marking each subtype of source in English, and, for instance, begin to use by in lieu of from for agents, the verb has or a possessive -s for possessors, because for causes, or than to mark the standard of comparison. The salience of sources as a group is reected in the many languages that mark them explicitly and often use the same device to mark dierent subtypes (Clark 2001; Clark and Carpenter 1989a, 1989b). Another emergent category children express early is degree of agency. When children acquiring English encounter two forms of the rst person pronoun, I and me, they may analyze them as marking control vs. absence of control, as in (3) and (4), where the rst-person pronoun is always used in self-reference: (3) Child in control: My cracked the eggs. Me jump. My taked it o. Child not in control: I like peas. I want my 3repair4 the blocks. I no want those.
(4)
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Children in control of the action talked about used me or my, but when someone else was in control, they were more likely to use I (Budwig 1995). As they got older, their initial misanalysis of I and me was replaced by the conventional identication of subject vs. object instead. With emergent categories, children look for forms to express conceptual distinctions. Sometimes a distinction goes unexpressed in their language. At other times, they select a form initially and use it appropriately in some cases but inappropriately in others, as with sources, where they must eventually work out the relations among from, by, of, and with in English. Or their initial analysis proves wrong because the forms they have started with in fact encode a dierent distinction, as in the case of degrees of agency. With other categories, children pick up on the appropriate forms from the start. In the case of plural marking on nouns in English, we predict that if children try to express plurality one vs. morethan-one before they have identied the appropriate inections, they will choose forms that are nonconventional yet semantically consistent with the target meaning.
1.2.
Formal complexity
How soon, and how, might children mark the contrast between one and more than one in their speech? In 1973, Slobin distinguished between conceptual and formal complexity in language acquisition. Conceptual complexity tracks the emergence of various conceptual distinctions that make up regular steps in childrens cognitive development, so while specic distinctions can be aected by childrens individual experience, they are assumed to develop similarly across dierent populations. Formal complexity oers a way of comparing the linguistic devices used to mark a specic distinction, across languages. For example, children acquiring English begin to make use of the plural -s with two of its three allomorphs (/-s/ as in cats, /-z/ as in dogs, and /-Iz/ as in horses) between 1;9 and 2;3, and exhibit adult-like mastery of many plural forms plus a handful of irregular forms, by age ve (Berko 1958; Brown 1973; Cazden 1968). Other languages make use of many more small paradigms for the plural, depending on noun-type and gender, and in addition may distinguish collections from sets of individuals, as in Arabic: and, in fact, studies of children acquiring Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic show that they take up to age 12 or later to master the full adult system for plural marking (Omar 1970; Ravid and Hayek 2003). The dierence between English and Arabic in formal complexity here, Slobin argued, accounts for the
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time it takes in each language for children to acquire conventional plural marking on nouns. At the same time, if cognitive development proceeds at the same pace regardless of language setting, and the notion of more-than-one is grasped early, children may well try to express the notion of more-thanone before they master the conventional forms for plurality in their language. Do children latch onto the pertinent part of the inectional system from the start? Or do they adopt some other device rst? We return to this question after a brief consideration of childrens early number concepts and counting.
1.3.
Early number concepts and counting
Human infants, along with other mammals, appear able to make use of a built-in accumulator system to process number (Dehaene et al. 1998; Starkey et al. 1990; Wynn 1995a, 1995b). Young infants distinguish between arrays of objects with small numbers, registering dierences between arrays of one, two, three, or four entities, in habituation studies. Infants this age also register surprise when one item is added to or subtracted from an existing array. But they are less good at such discriminations as arrays get larger. At ve to six months of age, infants reliably distinguish one from two, three, or four items with individual objects, with sounds (drumbeats), and with iterated actions (a clown jumping). By 14 months, infants can pick the larger of two amounts (number of crackers in one of two buckets, in crawling reach) when given comparisons of one versus two, and two versus three (Feigenson et al. 2002). But since they are at chance for two versus four, three versus six, or one versus four, infants dont appear to rely on ratio dierences. Infants this age seem able to track one-to-one correspondences in reaching into a box to pull out the right number of objects, not visible inside the box (Feigenson and Carey 2003), provided they have to retrieve only one, two, or three objects. But they fail with four, just as in the buckets study (Feigenson et al. 2002), where, once the number in either bucket exceeded three, they appear unable to compare the two amounts. However, if a set of four objects is broken into two and two, 14-month-olds succeed in retrieving all four objects by reaching into a box (Feigenson and Halberda 2004). These ndings strongly suggest that infants this age, and older, can spontaneously represent up to three objects and keep track of them, but have diculty doing so with more than three.
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What impact might this have on childrens ability to learn and use count-sequences? By age two or so, children have begun to use simple count-sequence routines, one-two-three, say, typically as an accompaniment to a repetitive action like going downstairs or picking up blocks. By age three, they appear to understand that each number in such a sequence designates some amount that increases the further on in the count sequence one is. But they take time to learn the exact numerosity associated with each count-word (Wynn 1990, 1992; see also Pollman 2003; Skwarchuk and Anglin 2002). This suggests that, despite some conceptual representation of numerosity, young children have diculty mapping their knowledge onto a system of counting. So one question here is, does counting and knowledge of numerical sequence play any role in childrens acquisition of plural marking in language?
1.4.
Marking more-than-one
The grammatical category of number can be marked at a variety of points on nouns, pronouns, articles, and demonstratives, on adjectives, and on verbs. Do children acquiring English simply aim for the relevant conventional morpheme, -s? They typically dont produce the plural morpheme consistently until around age three or older, and even after that, have diculty with syllabic plurals (in words like horses or roses) and with irregular noun plurals ( geese, children, deer) for several years. Researchers have documented several stages in acquisition with children initially making no use of plural inections, then producing an occasional irregular form (e.g., men, feet ) but not necessarily with plural meaning, followed by sporadic uses of plural -s on some nouns (see Cazden 1968; Mervis and Johnson 1991). In fact, children appear to add the plural ending word-by-word when they rst begin to produce it, with frequency in child-directed speech being one factor guiding their use (Lieven et al. 1997; Zapf 2004; Zapf and Smith 2003). This stage is followed by increasing use of plural -s on both regular and irregular stems (e.g., Berko 1958; de Villiers and de Villiers 1973; see also Maratsos 2000; Marcus et al. 1992). This suggests that children by now apply a general rule for marking nouns as plural, or else rely on a template to produce the appropriate form (see Bybee and Slobin 1982). All these studies focus on the plural inection itself. But if children try to mark more-than-one before they acquire the conventional devices for that purpose, what options are they most likely to rely on? In a recent survey of language structures, over half the sample of 957 languages (52%) made use if suxation to mark the plural of
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nouns (Dryer 2005; Haspelmath et al. 2005). Notice that suxes are both favored across languages (Hawkins and Cutler 1988; Hawkins and Gilligan 1988) and consistently acquired earlier than prexes (Slobin 1973, 1985). Many fewer languages relied on prexation instead (12%), and only eight languages in the sample used reduplication (1%) the device most similar to iteration. While reduplication keeps the noun stem intact, it is rare, and other word-based options tend to obscure the stem phonologically. This is important because children typically take up rst elements that are transparent in meaning. For instance, they show an initial preference for compounding (known stems are transparent in meaning) over suxation in the formation of new nouns, e.g., openman (someone who opens things), sky-car (airplane), magic-man (magician), or car-smoke (exhaust) (Clark 1993). Of course, as children continually learn the meanings of more stems and axes, what is transparent changes with age and stage in acquisition. Transparent forms are more accessible, even if less ecient, for young children whose knowledge of the language, and of how things are done, is still limited. Notice that some conventional plural forms, like books, mice, or sheep, are likely to be less transparent than nonconventional more book, two mouse, or sheep-sheep. Finally, a number of languages did not mark plural on nouns at all (9%). Some of these, however, marked plurality elsewhere, with classiers or numerals, or with some marking on the verb (see further Dryer 2005; Haspelmath 2005; also Corbett 2000). These plurals, then, were analytic rather than synthetic. We predicted that children who try to express the notion more-thanone early should pick a (relatively) transparent linguistic device to do so. They could use a numeral plus a bare noun stem (e.g., two rabbit ), a quantier and bare noun (more rabbit ), or even the same noun iterated (rabbit-rabbit ). The choice of specic numeral or quantier could dier from one child to the next, although the choice of form here is also likely to be aected by adult usage and by frequency in adult speech. Children should replace these forms later on with a noun plus plural-sux. The studies that follow were designed to nd out how children mark plurality (more-than-one) in contrast to singularity during the earliest stages of acquisition in English. We focus in particular on the forms children choose prior to mastering conventional forms for the plural. We begin by looking at longitudinal observations from a diary for one child and regular recordings for two others, then extend our ndings with the elicitation of plural forms from young two- and three-year-olds.
110 2.
E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina Study 1: early spontaneous plural marking in English
Our starting point for this study was a set of diary observations of one child, D, between the ages of 1;8 and 2;4 (Clark, unpublished diary), in the period during which he began to distinguish in his speech between references to one vs. more-than-one object. These data are complemented by analyses of two corpora from the CHILDES Archive for Eve (1;6 2;3) and Adam (2;3 to 3;0) (Brown 1973; MacWhinney and Snow 1990). The ndings for all three children suggest that their exposure to count sequences played a role in their initial attempts to mark plurality systematically, albeit nonconventionally, in their speech.
2.1.
Diary observations of D
This diary, kept by the rst author, contains daily observations with detailed information on each context of use. We extracted all the entries, from 1;8 to 2;4, in which D used a bare noun to designate more than one object (established from the contextual notes), plus all instances of conventional and nonconventional plural forms for plural referents. The account that follows is based on those data. D began to mark plurality with the numeral two, as in exchanges like that in (5): (5) D (1;8.16, at the table, with a toy truck): wheel. (then pointing at a second wheel) wheel two.1 (then pointing at a picture on the milk carton) cow milk. (then back to the wheels on the truck again): wheel two.
In several subsequent uses, he sometimes used two to pick out exactly two objects, probably by accident, as in the rst part of the next two exchanges: (6) (7) D (1;9.9, carrying two blue racquetball balls upstairs to breakfast) D: Herb racquetball two. D (1;9.14, at the table, playing with the two doll-blankets hed brought upstairs with him and then stashed in his chair): one, one blanket. (he then dropped one on the oor): other blanket oor. (then pulled the second blanket o the table, and dropped it too; and, looking rst down on one side, then on the other, at the two blankets now on the oor) two blanket.
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The rst unambiguous use of two for more-than-one regardless of amount occurred a few weeks later, as noted in (8): (8) Mother (counting four frogs in picture): look at these: one, two, three, four! D (1;10.9): frog, two frog.
D continued to use two for more than one over the next few weeks, as shown in (9): (9) D (2;0.9): Damon see two running-shoe. Mother: where were they? D (misunderstanding the question): eve shoes and herb shoes.
This exchange also contained clear -s marking for the plural on shoe. Indeed, use of two as a plural marker overlapped with the emergence of the conventional plural sux. His rst use of a plural -s in combination with two had occurred about six weeks prior to this, as indicated in (10): (10) D (1;9.23, with two pieces of edge-binding tape, one on the table, one that had fallen on the oor): a tape. (pointing) a tape a oor (pointing down at the second piece). two tapes.
He continued to use two as a plural marker over the next four months, as in the exchanges with his father in (11) and (12): (11) D (2;0.11, reading a book with his father) Father (of picture of a box containing three birds): whos in the box? D: birds. Father: how many birds are there? D: two birds. D (2;0.15, playing with his magnets, holding three or four in his hand) Father: how many magnets have you got? D: two!
(12)
From about 1;10 on, D also began using three-four for lots, many, while still using two as a plural, for more-than-one. Both these uses are illustrated in the exchange in (13): (13) D (1;10.12, playing with the house-puzzle): two house(s). (then, spanning the six-house puzzle with both hands) three-four houses. (and, as he moved one hand the length of the puzzle) three seven . . . eight!
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The primary contrast at this point appeared to be between two, for plural, and the occasional three-four for lots. During this whole period, D changed what had up to then been his routine count-sequence, used, for example, whenever he went upstairs. While it had been one, two, three, four, ve, six, seven, he now switched to one, three, four, ve. . . . That is, once he began using two as a plural marker, he removed it from his count-sequence.2 In summary, D began by using two as his plural marker with bare nouns at 1;8, for two, three, or four objects. Then he gradually shifted over to reliance on the plural inection on nouns, with some overlap during this period between the two devices when he used both two and -s. He also made a little use of a compound number form (three-four) for many, in contrast to two. And he pulled two out of his counting routine while he was using it as a plural. But by about 2;4, he had restored two to his count-sequence and no longer used it as a plural marker with bare nouns. This coincided with an expansion of his uses of the plural sux on count nouns in plural contexts.
2.2.
Recordings of Eve
The observations available for Eve, in the form of transcripts for 20 tapes of recordings made from 1;6 to 2;3, do not contain as much contextual information as the diary, but they do note where early plural forms produced by the child were imitations, and it is possible to glean some contextual information from the content of the adult utterances in each exchange. During the rst two months of recordings (1;61;8), Eve used two with a bare noun on several occasions to pick out more-than-one, as shown in (14)(16). Just as in Ds data, she applied two to two-object sets, but also to sets of three, four, and more objects. This suggests that, for the moment, it simply means more-than-one. (14) Mother: now how many letters do you have? Eve (1;7): two letter. Mother: two letters. how many letters do I have? Eve: two letter. Mother: two letters. Mother: how many tinker-toys do you have? Eve (1;7): two tinker-toy. Mother: and on this farm he had some . . . . Eve (1;8): MOO. MOO
(15) (16)
Antecedents to plural marking Mother: he had some cows . . . . Eve: donkey. Mother: donkeys. Eve: two donkey. donkey.
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Eves earliest plural forms, blocks (1;7) and cookies (1;8), were for the formerly singular-only block and cookie. Eves count-sequences during the same period suggest that, like D, she also conferred special status on two. She usually counted one, two, three, two, as in (17): (17) Mother: one two three four. Eve (1;6): one two three. one two three two one two three two. Mother: no, four. its one, two, three, four. Eve: one, two, three, two, one, two, three, two. Mother: you know how to count, dont you? Eve: one, two, three, one, two, three one, two, three, two.
At 1;9, Eve added the plural ending to one more noun, ngers, but continued to combine two with bare nouns for plurals, as in two car, two duck, and two doggie. But in the next month, she occasionally used two combined with plural -s for plurals, as in (18) and (19), though she reverted to the bare noun with two in response to how many questions: (18) Eve (1;9): have two crackers. Adult: how many crackers do you have? Eve: have two cracker. Mother: how many crackers? more than two. Eve (1;9): e 3here here4 here two beads. Father: two? Eve: yeah. Father: how many beads are there? Eve: two bead.
(19)
Eves uses of two with bare and inected nouns for several objects (often more than two) strongly suggest that, at this stage, she was using two as a plural marker. In addition, the rather odd uses in her count-sequences are further evidence that she distinguished two from other numbers there. At 1;10, Eve used two with several plural nouns: two beads, two crackers, two pocketbooks, as well as with bare nouns (e.g., two knife, two noodle-soup). Over the next two months, she extended the plural sux to more nouns (e.g., dolls, crayons, toys, dollies, cards, books, pictures, lions, tigers, bicycles, ducks, pigs, kittens, apples, shoes, hats, words). From 1;11
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on, she also started to use no more in combination with plural nouns, as in no more squirrels and no more pans. From 2;0 on, she also combined some with plurals, as in some glasses, some balls, some ladies, and some cars. Between 2;0 and 2;2, Eve came to use plural nouns consistently with some (some glasses, some balls, some ladies, some cars) as well as with two (e.g., two dolls, two windows, two cups, two men, two busses, two owers, two houses). She also began to use other numbers with plural nouns (e.g., three girls, seven horses, ve doggies). And from 2;2, she began to use count-sequences in answering how many-questions, as in (20) and (21): (20) (21) Adult: how many dyou have? Eve (2;2): two, three. Adult: how many rings? Eve (2;2): two, three, four. Mother: two, three, four? no. I dont have that many.
This suggests that Eve has realized that number words are used to indicate amount, but she has yet to x the reference for each numeral she produces.
2.3.
Recordings of Adam
The recordings for Adam were similar to those for Eve in that contextual details had to be inferred from the adult utterances. For the present study, we looked at the 20 transcripts of recordings made between 2;3.4 and 3;0,11 (Brown 1973). In the rst three months (2;32;5), Adam produced several plural forms on nouns previously used only as bare nouns, for example, boots, hands, toys. He also made frequent use of two as an apparent plural-marker, only in combination with bare nouns. Among his many such uses were two boot, two sock, two truck, two block, two ear, two eye, two knee, two leg, and two goose. Like Eve, he used only the numeral two in combination with nouns, even though he produced several other numerals in his count-sequences. Around 2;6, the plural ending became more productive for Adam and he extended it to many more nouns (e.g., buckets, wheels, seals, eyes, balls, doughnuts). He also started to use two with plural noun forms, as in two cars, two pieces, two eyes, two doggies, and two minute 3repair4 minutes, and produced it with only a couple of bare nouns two doughnut and two weather. From 2;8 onwards, Adam used two, and occasionally other numerals, in combination with plural marking on the accompanying noun, as in two cowboys, three cups, three cats, two raisins, two horses, two perros,
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two men/mans. (The extent to which these references were numerically accurate is unclear: in most cases, we could infer only that more than one object was being talked about.) And, at this point, Adam made a generalization about all numeral uses, and began to mark the noun with a plural sux even with one, as in one knees, one cups, one busses. Adam at this point also switched to using three to mark plurality in answering how many-questions, as shown in (22)(24). Earlier, he consistently produced two in answering such questions. (22) Adult: and what else? Adam (2;8.16): ear. Adult: how many? Adam: three. Mother: tell me how many balls you have there. Adam (2;9.18): three. Mother: three? ok, you count, and let me see. Mother: how many? Adam (2;9.18): three. Mother: three! I saw more than three.
(23)
(24)
On other occasions, Adam answered such questions with part of a countsequence, as in (25)(27). (25) Mother: how many feet? Adam (2;4.15): four, eight, nine, ten. Mother: how many eyes? Adam: two, three, eight, eight, nine, ten. Adult: how many pencils did you put in there? Adam (2;5.12): four, eight, nine. Mother: how many? Adam (2;11.28): three, four, ve, six. Mother: how many? Adam: three, four, ve, six. Mother: oh, my goodness. What happened to one, two, three?
(26) (27)
What is unclear is the size of the set at issue on each occasion. It appears probable that the count-sequences here signalled larger sets than those marked by two.
2.4.
Summary
All three children adopted the numeral two as an initial plural marker and as an answer to how many questions. At rst, they combined it
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with a bare noun. As they began to add the plural sux to nouns, they produced two along with the plural form for more than one. Adam seems to have acquired number terms slightly later than the other two children, and was the only one to also use three as a plural marker on a few occasions, even when he was talking about only two objects. For both Eve and Adam, two was produced much more frequently than any other number. This numeral accounted for 82% of Eves 60 numeral uses between 1;6 and 2;3, and for 68% of Adams 108 uses between 2;3 and 3;0. Eve made three uses of one, and one or two uses of other numerals with nouns. Adam made more use of one (34% of his numeral uses), but he also misused it by combining it with plural nouns, as in one knees (2;8). He also made a few uses of three plural noun in answer to how many-questions, as shown in (22)(24). Both Eve and Adam made some uses of other modiers like some or more in combination with plural nouns, in plural contexts, once they produced the plural -s on nouns, as shown in (28) and (29): (28) (29) Adam (2;9.18): lie down time a nap. put some pillows on it. Eve (1;11) Sue a get some pictures. Mother: well a these were gonna send to Granny. Eve: Sue a let me . . . . Mother: Moms just put stamps on them.
More appeared throughout with bare nouns for both children, nearly always in requests where the child did not currently have the object requested, as in (30): (30) Eve (1;6): more cookie. more cookie. Mother: your cookies there on the table.
When combined with a negative, more was used to note current absence, as in (31): (31) Eve (1;11): Fraser a no more squirrels. In short, they did not use more in the way they did two, to mark the presence of more-than-one. These observations of spontaneous use from three young children suggest that they go down the following path as they move from nonconventional to conventional marking of the plural for more-than-one in their speech: (a) They rst choose some nonconventional form, e.g., the numeral two, to mark the presence of more than one object, in contrast to just one. This form is often borrowed from their rst count-
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(b)
(c)
(d)
sequences and so might be said to be semantically quite appropriate for the expression more-than-one. They exhibit piecemeal acquisition of the conventional plural sufx, adding it to nouns on a word-by-word basis (Lieven et al. 1997; see also Mervis and Johnson 1991; Zapf 2004; Zapf and Smith 2003), while continuing to use two as a pluralizer. They extend the plural sux to an increasing number of nouns, and begin to contrast plural-sux nouns with (bare) singular forms, now often without two. They start making use of terms other than numerals in combination with plural count nouns (cf. Eves no more squirrels at 1;11 2;0, and some glasses, some ball, at 2;02;2).
Finally, we looked at adult uses of the childrens earliest plurals to see whether there was any evidence that adults used those nouns with redundant plural marking, with any consistency. In earlier research, Nicolacida-Costa and Harris (1983) noted that adults often used redundant plural marking in the form of deictic these or those, quantiers like many, and numerals before plural nouns, in speech to young children. Unfortunately, in the present data for Eve and for Adam, adult uses of the childrens earliest plural nouns in the transcripts were too infrequent for such an analysis. At the same time, it is clear that there were both redundant and nonredundant uses in parental speech: For instance, Eves early plural form blocks was used by her mother as follows in the transcript for Eve aged 1;71;8: (32) Can you get the blocks out? Eve a you stop throwing the blocks. You go in and build a tower with your blocks. Would you like to have these blocks? Oh these are blocks anyway. How many blocks? You must put the blocks in the box rst before you play with the bouillon cubes. Put the blocks away rst. You can play with the bouillon cubes if you put the blocks back in the box. You help me put the blocks away. Blocks.
Only two of these uses appear with multiple plural marking (these, these are). Eves early plural cookies (1;61;8) is represented in her mothers speech in a similar way:
118 (33)
E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina You xxx more cookies? No more cookies a Eve. Christmas tree cookies a uh-huh. Icing a for the cookies. Im making cookies a Eve. Im decorating the cookies. Im icing the cookies a Eve.
Many other early plurals are relatively infrequent in parental speech: for example, the parents never produced the form cars in the transcripts we analyzed. At the same time, children did receive referential support for the plural meaning of nouns in -s. Adults used plural nouns when there was more than one category member in the target set. In conclusion, throughout this period, children are working at establishing the connection of numerals and plural suxes to contexts where there is more than one object to be talked about, and at learning how to reply when asked about the number of objects in a set (how manyquestions). And, as Wynn (1992) pointed out, once children have identied two as a device for indicating more than one, even if they dont know its numerical value, they can co-opt it (a) to use it in contrast to one, and then (b) bootstrap from two to three, simply by assuming that the meaning of three must be dierent from two, since a dierence in form marks a dierence in meaning, by contrast (Clark 1987, 1990). But in the meantime, we should be careful not to take count sequences as indicating any knowledge of number; they are merely verbal routines associated with activities like going up stairs, building blocks into towers, or putting sets of objects away.
3.
Study 2: elicited production and comprehension of nonconventional and conventional plural forms in English
Let us return to the question we began with: How do children map their representation of one vs. more-than-one to the conventional devices for indicating plurality in a language? At what stage do they show signs of understanding plural marking on nouns or on verbs? For example, when shown a screen with candidate pictures accompanied by either Look there are some blickets (with multiple plural marking) vs. Look there is a blicket, 24-month-olds (but not 20-month-olds) choose the appropriate picture. But the same children fail when they hear Look at the blickets vs. Look at the blicket, with the plural marking only on the noun. By 36 months, children succeed on both conditions (Kouider et al. 2006). This
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suggests that children attend earlier to certain verbs (are vs. is) than to the -s on nouns, although its unclear whether two- or even three-year-olds would do equally well on other auxiliaries (have vs. has), or on lexical verbs like jump vs. jumps. Overall, these ndings suggest that multiplymarked plural forms should be easier than those marked only with the plural noun inection, -s. And children should be ahead in comprehension over production (Clark and Hecht 1983). In production, they might rst rely on a numeral like two to contrast one with more-than-one, as observed in Study 1. How widespread is this choice in plural contexts? Do children consistently contrast bare nouns for one instance vs. their plural form (two Noun, say) for more-thanone? Are there dierences in the patterns of use observable in production (and comprehension) for two-year-olds compared to three-year-olds? We predicted that if children could not yet produce the relevant plural inection for a noun, they might try to mark plurality by using a numeral, or some other semantically appropriate form, in combination with a bare noun.
3.1.
Method
3.1.1. Materials. We designed two picture books with 20 double pages, such that each double page had pictures of the same types of object, with one picture on the left-hand page and the other on the right. For half the pages, there was a single object depicted on the left, and several on the right; this pattern was reversed for the remaining pages. Pages depicting more than one object contained pictures of sets with instances of the same kind that were not identical to each other. These sets consisted of two, three, or four objects each. The rst four picture pairs were warmup items, with the same ones used in both books (one vs. two beds, four lights vs. one, two chairs vs. one, and one fork vs. four). The remaining 16 picture pairs, in random order, comprised the test items. Half were pictures of animate entities (potential referents for the nouns bird, cat, cow, dog, duck, lion, pig, rabbit ) and half of inanimates (potential referents for the nouns ball, block, cup, hat, pencil, shoe, sock, spoon). These nouns are all represented in the rst 200300 words in two-year-old vocabulary norms established by the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al. 1994). Both books contained the same picture pairs, but the 16 test pairs in each book were presented in a dierent random order, with the left-right assignments of pictures in each pair counterbalanced. One book was used to elicit production, and the other to check on comprehension, so each
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child saw both books. Assignment of books to tasks was counterbalanced across children at each age. We always gave the production task rst so the forms we used in the questions in the comprehension task could not bias childrens production in any way. Four pairs of sample pages are illustrated in Figure 1. 3.1.2. Procedure. In the production task, the Experimenter and child looked through one of the two books while seated at a low table. For each double page, E revealed only one page at a time, the left then the right, asking the child for each one, What do you see there? or Whats on here? (without ever using the target word in any form). These questions were designed to elicit 16 singular and 16 plural forms. If children used another term in lieu of the one anticipated, that was still counted in scoring the data. In the comprehension task, E rst asked the child to nd something, then the child was shown the full double page and had to respond by choosing the appropriate referent(s). Four of the 16 questions asked the child to identify a single instance with a singular noun phrase (e.g., Find me one duck); four used an article and plural noun (Find me the cats); four a numeral and plural noun (e.g., Find me two dogs), and four a numeral and a bare noun (e.g., Show me two book, hence also requiring a plural referent). The question types were presented in one of two random orders, counterbalanced across children within each age. After children completed these two tasks, E ended with a nal brief elicitation task. She showed each child two sets of small toys, and asked one question about each set. (The order in which the toys were shown and the questions asked were both counterbalanced across children.) The questions were: (a) How many cows are there? (b) How many blocks are there? [correct answer, 4] [correct answer, 3]
This was to check on whether children produced any specialized forms just in response to how many-questions, and to nd out whether they had recourse to counting when there were three or more objects to deal with. 3.1.3. Participants. The 31 children studied were drawn from families attending a local nursery school: 18 were aged between 1;11 and 2;2 (mean age 2;0) and 13 aged between 2;11 and 3;2 (mean age 3;0). All the three-year-olds were attending the nursery school on a regular basis, as were 8 of the two-year-olds. The remaining twos were either younger siblings of children already attending the school, or children who would enter the school after the summer session. They therefore belonged to
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Figure 1. Sample pairs of pages
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the same population with a similar social background. The children were acquiring English as a rst language. Most of the younger children were tested in a small game room o a courtyard next to the classrooms. These children were accompanied by a parent who sat beside the child across from E, or held the child on his/her lap, and oered occasional encouragement. The remaining two-year-olds and all the threes were tested in a quiet corner in their classroom or outside in the adjacent play-yard. In all the sessions, E looked at the books with each child, while an observer unobtrusively recorded the session and made notes on the childs responses on a score sheet. The tapes for each session were later transcribed as a further check of the childrens responses in both tasks.
3.2.
Results
To what extent have two- and three-year-olds mapped their representation of one instance vs. more-than-one to conventional devices for indicating plurality in English? We present the data on comprehension rst, for both age groups, although this was always the second task, before we take up our ndings for production. 3.2.1. Comprehension. In the comprehension task, the child saw two facing pages, and had to choose the one that corresponded to Es request. The two-year-olds found this task more dicult, overall, than the threeyear-olds, and the two-year-olds responses tended to be harder to interpret because they would at times choose both pages (one hand on each), or point rst at one page, then at the other. The task was completed by 17 of the 18 two-year-olds, and by all 13 three-year-olds. The summary data for correct choices in response to requests containing a bare singular noun, a plural noun, a numeral plus plural noun, and a numeral plus bare noun (where the last three expression types were all intended to pick out the sets of objects depicted on the page with more-than-one) are given in Table 1. On average, two-year-olds oered correct responses to all the adult requests combined (four for singular referents and 12 for plural referents) 64% of the time; they gave erroneous responses 30% of the time, and no response 6% of the time. The three-year-olds produced correct responses 90% of the time, and made errors 10% of the time. (There was only one nonresponse in this group.) In scoring the childrens responses, we counted only clear cases where the child pointed to the picture with only a singleton in response to a singular noun phrase, and to the picture with

Table 1. Percentage of correct comprehension responses by age Age 2;0 3;0 Mean N 17 13 Noun-sg 57 90 72 Noun-pl 76 88 82 Numeral N-pl 54 88 69
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Numeral N-sg 66 92 78
Note: For 2s, each percentage is based on 68 data points; and for 3s, on 52 data points.
more-than-one in response to the other three request types. This may have underestimated the younger childrens ability to understand the singular (57% correct) compared to the plural (65%), in part for the following reason: when they pointed at pictures of more than one object, they could have been picking out just one individual from the set depicted, but the dierence was not signicant. The older children, in comparison, did equally well on the singular and the three plural forms, as shown in Table 1. The errors children made in comprehension otherwise probably depended to some extent on their familiarity with the words used for the objects pictured. (There was variation from one child to the next in which words were interpreted appropriately.) The slightly (but not signicantly) better performance by two-year-olds on plural nouns could also reect the fact that children learn some nouns in plural form rst and only later learn their singulars (Lieven et al. 1997; also Boyle and Gerken 1997). Terms for pairs of objects, for example, tend to be used by parents in the plural more frequently than in the singular. However, only two of the 16 target words in the study (shoe and sock) were candidates for this interpretation. Did use of a numeral in place of, or combined with, a plural inection make any dierence to comprehension? The answer appears to be no. Overall, two-year-olds did slightly better on plural nouns without numerals (at 76%) than those with numerals (at 60%), but they did equally well on plurals marked with -s and those marked only with a numeral (65% and 66% correct, respectively). The three-year-olds did equally well in comprehension on singular (90%) and plural (89%) forms in selecting appropriate referents, and showed no dierences for the three types of forms used for more-thanone: they treated plural inections and numerals alike when selecting plural referents. 3.2.2. Production. In the production task, the children each looked at the 32 individual pages and produced a word or phrase for each one. This task was completed by 12 of the two-year-olds and all 13 three-year-olds.
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Table 2. Percentage of correct and incorrect singular and plural forms produced, by age Age N Conventional Singular 2;0 3;0 12 13 65 82 Plural 47 74 Incorrect Singular 22 8 Plural 42 25 No response Singular 12.5 1 Plural 11 2
Note: Percentages for 2s are based on 192 data points, and for 3s on 208 data points.
(The remaining children balked at the production task but were often willing to go on to try the comprehension task instead. We only switched to this option when it was quite clear that the child was unwilling to try, much less complete, the initial production task.) The overall response rate of the children completing the production task was very high at 96.5%. The two-year-olds failed to respond on only four occasions, while the threes did so more often, with 26 nonresponses, nearly all for singulars. The percentages of responses using conventionally correct singular or plural forms, incorrect forms, and nonresponses are given for each age group in Table 2. Both two- and three-year-olds made errors in production, as shown in Table 2. The two-year-olds made numerous errors on both singular (22%) and plural (42%) forms, getting only 56% correct overall. When asked to produce singular forms, they sometimes (13%) used the plural instead. These erroneous uses of plurals accounted for 60% of their 44% errors on the singular. Their other errors consisted of bare color terms that could not be identied as either singular or plural, and some Dont knows and no responses. When asked to produce plural forms, two-year-olds used singulars 38% of the time. These responses accounted for most (84%) of their errors in producing the plural. Their remaining errors consisted of onomatopoeic terms (6%), color terms (2%), and occasional use of terms like other or that (8%), none of which could be reliably identied as a plural marking. The three-year-olds produced the appropriate singular forms for pictures of single objects 82% of the time, and appropriate plural forms for depictions of sets of more than one object 74% of the time. Like the twoyear-olds, their main errors on singulars consisted of uses of the plural form of the pertinent noun. These accounted for nearly all their singular errors (91% of the 18% errors). With plurals, their dominant error (84% of the 26% error rate) was production of the singular. Overall, all the children also showed considerable variation in just which plural forms they could each produce, further evidence for initial piecemeal acquisition of the plural inection on nouns, and for early
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noun and verb inections in general (see Elsen 1997; Gathercole et al. 1999; Ko pcke 1998; Lieven et al. 1997; Mervis and Johnson 1991; Pizzuto and Caselli 1992; Szagun 2001; Wilson 2003; Zapf 2004). 3.2.3. Nonconventional plural marking. Both two- and three-year-olds made errors on the plural, but in a number of these errors, the children used forms that were semantically compatible with the notion of morethan-one. They made use of two main strategies here. In the rst, they did something akin to reduplication, and simply iterated the bare singular form of the noun several times, as in hat, hat (for two hats), kitty, kitty, kitty (for four cats), or lamp, lamp, lamp (for three light bulbs). These iterations were often accompanied by touch-pointing, but the number of pointing gestures didnt necessarily correspond to the number of times the child iterated the word, nor to the number of referents in the set. This option was taken up on occasion by six children ve two-yearolds and one three-year-old. The second strategy was to combine a numeral, usually two, with the bare stem form of the relevant noun (e.g., two goose [ducks], two cow, two block, two rabbit ). This option was used by 12 children 2 twoyear-olds and 10 three-year-olds. Notice that this choice will result in a conventional form as soon as the children start to add the plural inection to the bare noun. We had expected that children might also rely on other quantiers like more or another to indicate more-than-one. But only 4 three-year-olds did this: they combined the quantier more with a bare singular, as in more shoe and more lion. In summary, children who are still learning to produce the plural sux to nouns (as indicated by their sporadic, item-specic, uses in plural contexts) sometimes rely on other means in production to contrast the meaning more-than-one with just one. Six children at times simply iterated the target noun, but it is hard to tell whether this iteration should really count as a form of nonconventional plural marking. It is nonetheless a strategy for identifying sets of more-than-one compared to just one. A further 12 children opted for the strategy we found in our analysis of longitudinal records (Study 1): they combined a numeral and bare noun. They used these forms, in contrast to singular forms for singleton objects, to convey the sense of more-than-one conventionally carried by the plural -s inection on nouns. Lastly, in carrying out this study, we asked two follow-up questions at the end, to see how the children responded to How many-questions as well as to the What-questions asked in the production task. For this, we showed each child two arrays of objects three blocks and four
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donkeys, or four blocks and three donkeys and asked of each array, How many do you see? Of the two-year-olds, eight tried to count in response to one or both questions, but their counts were generally wrong, with most consisting only of the sequence one, two. The remaining twos gave a bare noun (e.g., block) or did not respond at all. Eight of the three-year-olds also responded by trying to count, generally incorrectly, with counts ranging from one, two to one seven eight. The remaining responses from threes consisted of single numbers (e.g., three for four donkeys, also for three blocks), or a numeral and noun combination (e.g., four horses). These ndings suggest that children learn to respond to How manyquestions with a number or count sequence well before they can actually count. The count sequences we observed here and in pilot testing revealed many gaps and missing numbers within the sequences. Most two-yearolds appeared to stop at either two or three, while three-year-olds could produce counts that went up to four or ve, and occasionally six. (However, they were all generally inaccurate.) This pattern of responding is reminiscent of young childrens responses to What color-questions: they readily oer color terms in answer to such questions but are generally wrong, since they have yet to x the reference of most color terms (Clark 2006).
4.
Study 3: elicited responses to how many- and what-questions
Recent studies of young childrens numerical concepts suggest that oneto two-year-olds can manage to remember and match amounts up to three quite easily, but have diculty dealing with larger numbers (e.g., Feigenson and Carey 2003, 2005; Feigenson et al. 2002). We therefore decided to contrast What- and How many-questions by presenting children with dierent numbers of objects in each set to be considered in order to nd out when they could dierentiate consistently between the two types of question. How many-questions should elicit a numerical response, one arrived at from a count of the objects in the target set. But if childrens ability to count is still limited, so that they can manage only counts of two or three objects, with numbers higher than three too dicult to assess, we would expect them to fail in answering How many-questions accurately for all sets larger than three. In contrast, What-questions, whether asked of two or of many more objects, should simply elicit a plural form of the relevant noun (either with -s or with a nonconventional expression for more-thanone), regardless of the set size at issue.
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We predicted that children should answer What-questions with a plural form of the relevant nouns, and answer How many-questions with a count sequence or a numeral. Children whose grasp of counting is rudimentary might manage this for small sets with only two or three items, but fail with sets containing four or more items. For larger sets larger than three, though, they might avoid counting and just select an arbitrary (large) number, such as ve or eight, regardless of the actual set size. Their count routines may also be unrelated to set size, and involve only pointing in succession some number of times (without verbalization), or pointing and counting simultaneously, but still not linking each point to a specic individual. When children use a plural for more-than-one, the actual number of objects should have little eect, unless acquisition of the plural ending is integrally linked to counting and to conceptual representations of actual amounts.
4.1.
Method
4.1.1. Procedure. Children were approached, one at a time, in the classroom, and asked if theyd like to look at what was in Es special box. If they agreed, the child and E sat down nearby at a nearby table or on the oor, and E opened each of the six box-compartment lids in turn, for each one asking the child either How many do you see? or What do you see? (Only one compartment was open at any one time.) The childs responses were recorded on a score sheet during the task. Each child looked into all six compartments in turn, and answered each of the questions put. 4.1.2. Participants. We collected data from 20 children (8 boys and 12 girls) in two age ranges with 10 children in each 2;5 to 2;8 (mean 2;6) and 2;9 to 3;2 (mean 2;11). All the children attended the same nursery school as those in Study 2, and were learning English as a rst language. 4.1.3. Materials. The experimental materials consisted of six small cardboard boxes with fold-in lids mounted on a board in two rows of three, back to back. Each box (each compartment in the 2 3 array) measured 3 in by 3 in on the base, by 2 in high. Inside each one was a set of objects: two cubes, three plastic dogs, four plastic donkeys, ve small solid rubber balls, eight miniature crayons, and nine small train engines, arranged as shown in Table 3. The sets were assigned at random to one of the six compartments, and the numbers 1 to 6 written lightly in pencil on the box lids.
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Table 3. Contents of each box compartment 2 plastic cubes 8 small crayons 4 plastic donkeys 3 plastic dogs 9 small train-engines 5 small rubber balls
Children received one of two orders of questions, starting either with a How many-question or with a What-question. The questions were then alternated, so each child received three questions of each type. The assignment of question type to each set (in the individual boxes) was randomized for each child by having each question session start at a dierent box number (from 1 to 6) in the array, shown in Table 3. 4.2. Results
All the children answered all the questions, for a total of 60 responses to What-questions and 60 to How many-questions. Since there were no differences in the patterns of responses in the two age groups, we collapsed across age in the analyses that follow. (The mean age for the 20 children was 2;8.) In answer to What-questions, 19 of the 20 children used a plural ending in at least one response, and 15 of them used plural endings in two or all three responses. Overall, 72% of these responses contained a plural ending on the noun provided, and 28% also contained a numeral. In answer to How many-questions, 15 of the 20 children used a numeral in at least two responses. Overall, 80% of these responses contained a numeral, and some 40% also contained a plural noun. Overall, then, children were more likely to answer What-questions with plural nouns and How manyquestions with numerals. We then compared the patterns of plural and numeral uses across the dierent numbers of objects in the boxes. As predicted for Whatquestions, there were no signicant dierences in the numbers of plurals supplied for two to three objects, four to ve objects, or eight to nine objects. Regardless of the set size, children were likely to use a plural form of the pertinent noun. But for numeral uses with How many-questions, the children were much more likely to produce numerals for two or three objects (78%) than for four or ve objects (28%), than for eight or nine objects (no numeral uses at all). When they counted, they did so only for two or three, and four or ve objects (33% and 42% respectively); they never did so for eight or nine objects. Their responses to the two question types by set size, displayed in Figure 2, diered signicantly (X 2 2 223:64, p < 0:0001).
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Figure 2. Plurals ( What?) vs. numerals (How many?) by set size
How accurate was their use of numerals and counts? Not very. When children supplied a single numeral in answer to How many-questions, they were correct 67% of the time for two or three objects, but only 27% of the time for four or ve objects, and not at all for eight or nine objects. When they counted the objects in a set instead, they also had diculty: They counted correctly 33% of the time for two or three objects, 58% of the time for four or ve, and 17% of the time (one child) for eight or nine objects. This suggests that their counting at age two consists primarily of counting routines, without any real knowledge of the rules for counting (Gelman and Meck 1983). And at a stage when they know only short countsequence routines, they have a greater probability of getting the count right for small sets. Many of the children also pointed (with touch pointing) as they counted, but, as in Study 2, the number of points they made typically failed to correspond either to how many numerals there were in the count sequence or to the number of objects in the target set. Finally, the fact that children produced plural forms regardless of the number of objects in each box (in fact, they were more likely to produce plurals for the two largest sets (Figure 2), but had diculty with numerals and counts for sets larger than three, suggests that they master the conceptual dierence between one and more-than-one well before they learn how to count even the objects for set sizes of only two or three.
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But for the linguistic distinction between singular and plural, it is the conceptual dierence between one and more-than-one that children try to express in their language even before they have identied the conventional devices used by adult speakers.
5.
Discussion
Emergent categories visible in young childrens speech oer clues to their current linguistic organization. Many forms children start out with prove to be antecedents to conventional linguistic distinctions made by adult speakers, as in the case of early plural marking that we have explored here. Others, however, appear to reect attempts by young children to express conceptually salient distinctions that happen not to receive any linguistic expression in that language (although they may well receive linguistic expression in other languages). In such cases, young children may try to make a linguistic distinction that is simply absent from the language they are acquiring, and that they will therefore have to give up. This is the case, for example, for pronoun forms like I and me that are initially assigned to mark degree of control (Budwig 1995). Emergent categories that children try to talk about early on can oer revealing information about several aspects of acquisition. They allow inferences about the meanings children have assigned to certain forms, and about the compatibility of those meanings with the meaning captured in the adult distinction at stake. They present evidence for the salience of some conceptual categories early on, categories that underlie widespread linguistic distinctions. They may also reveal the routes children can follow in acquiring the adult system: not all children follow the same path.
5.1.
Choosing a form for a meaning
How do children choose a form to express whatever meaning distinction they are currently interested in? They must look for a known form or expression that appears to be semantically compatible with the distinction they are trying to express. In the case of sources, for example, they typically pick up on the locative source preposition from (Clark and Carpenter 1989a). And in the case of emergent plurals, as shown here, they pick up on the numeral two for more-than-one. In a similar way, children may pick up on a term like spoonful, rst used in contexts like that in (34) and then extended to mean a lot of in utterances like those in (35) and (36):
Antecedents to plural marking (34)
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(35) (36)
Mo (talking about Ds cereal, oatmeal): Ill have to give you some more. D (1;11.30): more. A BIG spoonful. D (2;0.14, displaying a handful of magnets): Damon have a spoonful magnets. D (2;1.26, talking about toys on the seat beside him in the car, planning to pick them up and carry them into the house): I reach in n get a spoonful my arm (with a gesture towards under his arm, meaning a big armful to carry) and then carry it upstairs.
How do young children choose forms to express the meaning they are looking for in the case of the singular/plural distinction? Their preliminary solutions for contrasting one with more-than-one are all analytic rather than synthetic, so the added element (a numeral, a quantier, or a repeat of a bare noun) is likely to be already known to them, and hence available as a possible expression for the meaning of more-than-one (Clark 1993). Their proto-plural uses also suggest that the potential meanings of free morphemes are more easily identied than those of bound morphemes like -s (Slobin 1973, 1985). That is, forms with meanings that are already (partially) known to them can be said to be transparent, and this makes them available for expressing that meaning in other contexts. All the devices children use for their earlier plural marking also appear in plural contexts in adult speech, in combination with conventionally marked plural nouns. Adult plurals often co-occur with other indications that the speaker is referring to more-than-one: quantiers like a lot of, heaps of, all, some; plural demonstratives like these and those, and numerals like two, three, and four. Three- to four-year-olds, in fact, do much better in comprehension when they hear redundant marking for morethan-one than when they hear only the plural sux on nouns (Nicolacida-Costa and Harris 1983; see also Kouider et al. 2006). Adult utterances like Six birds, More shoes, or One cat, another cat, and another cat, suggest that children are likely to extract their initial forms for marking the notion of more-than-one from adult speech heard in plural contexts (Bloom and Wynn 1997; Nicolaci-da-Costa and Harris 1983). To what extent do adults use numerals when they use plural nouns? Durkin and his colleagues (1986) followed 10 infants until age three, tracking parental uses of numerals in conversational exchanges. Adults consistently used the numeral one more frequently than two, two more frequently than three, and three more frequently than four, with no change as their children got older. At 2;0, the children used the numeral two more than twice as often as one or three, and roughly nine times as
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often as four. But by 3;0, they had shifted to a signicantly dierent pattern, and now paralleled the frequencies in adult usage. Lastly, another factor that may contribute to the choice of two in English is that phonologically, two is the only low-value numeral that contains no fricative consonant until one reaches eight, nine, or ten in English count sequences. Compare three, four, ve, six, and seven. This account is tta eight as a lent some support from Swedish where children pick on a tta hund eight dog), again a numeral containing a plural marker (e.g., a kansson 1998). At the same time, a tta would appear much later stop (Ha in count sequences than English two, and we have no information about the relative frequencies of dierent low-value numerals in Swedish. These ndings are all consistent with our nding that when children acquiring English rely on a numeral to mark more-than-one, they typically choose two, the most frequently used numeral for more-than-one in parental speech, for this purpose.
5.2.
Conceptual categories
Emergent categories also oer evidence for the salience of conceptual categories in childrens early attempts to nd forms to express certain meanings (Clark 2001). Some researchers have argued that childrens conceptual categories are shaped from the start by adult usage (e.g., Bowerman 1985; Choi and Bowerman 1991), while others have proposed that children rely rst on whatever conceptual categories they have already established as they move into language towards the end of their rst year and start to assign meanings to words and phrases (e.g., Slobin 1985). Childrens early uses of nonconventional forms to mark the notion more-than-one support the view that early conceptual development interacts with the language they are exposed in the early stages of acquisition. While their initial attempts to express certain distinctions may be driven by the conceptual salience of a specic distinction, they also attend, from early on, to adult usage. And as they hear more language from adults, they learn more themselves and adjust their own uses of linguistic forms to conform to the adult usage around them.
5.3.
Alternate routes
Do all children follow the same path as they acquire a rst language? The answer here appears to be no, but researchers have devoted little attention
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to this aspect of the process of acquisition. Some evidence for alternative routes comes from studies of meaning acquisition. For example, when children acquiring English learn the meanings of deictic terms like here and there or this and that, some start by using themselves as the deictic centre (what is here or this, is near the child) regardless of whether the child is the speaker or not, while others start out right away by choosing the speaker as the deictic centre (Clark and Sengul 1978). Children also follow dierent paths, based on whether they are only children or are younger siblings in a family, in their acquisition of I and you, the rst pronouns to be acquired (Oshima-Takane et al. 1996). Second born children learn the shifting nature of rst- and second-person pronouns I is always the speaker and you the addressee more quickly than rstborn children, apparently because they hear appropriate pronoun usage in overheard speech from their parents to their siblings. Dierences in the path followed also show up in the earliest stages of word combination. Some children begin by combining content words to form two-word utterances (e.g., mommy read, cup table) while others combine content words only with a small number of pronominal forms like there (e.g., cat there, book there) (Bloom et al. 1975; Nelson 1975). In another study, this time of motion verbs and syntactic constructions for talking about caused motion, Chenu and Jisa (2006) found two quite distinct routes to adult-like mastery. One child they observed focused on the general locative verb mettre to put combined with locative prepositional phrases like sur la table, dans la maison, etc. The other child began by acquiring locative verbs with more specic meanings such as accrocher put onto a hook, hang up, and used these in combination with terms for the objects being placed. The lexically general versus lexically specic paths these two children followed were directly relatable to the frequencies of the relevant verbs and constructions in their parents speech. The mother of the rst child used the general verb mettre much more frequently than more specic locative verbs in talking about caused motion and location, while the mother of the second favored locative verbs with more specic meanings. In English too, as children start to use verbs with specic constructions, they rst produce those forms and constructions that are most frequent in their parents speech (de Villiers 1985). Childrens attention to the frequency of the forms used in adult speech appears to be one factor in marking out the specic path each child follows at particular points during acquisition. The general basis for such dierences most likely resides in the dierent linguistic experiences children are exposed to from the start (e.g., Hart and Risley 1995).
134 5.4.
E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina Piecemeal inections
The present ndings also support the view that learning to produce the plural sux is a gradual aair, involving piecemeal, word-by-word acquisition (e.g., Lieven et al. 1997; Mervis and Johnson 1991). This is consistent with observations across a variety of languages where children display lexically specic patterns in their rst uses of noun and verb inections, followed by relatively slow extensions of the same inection to other stems (e.g., Elsen 1997; Gathercole et al. 1999; MacWhinney 1976; Pizzuto and Caselli 1992; Szagun 2001; Wilson 2003; Zapf and Smith 2003; see also Peters and Menn 1993; Veneziano and Parisse 2005). In addition, for nouns, the more familiar the word and the more frequent its plural uses in adult speech, the more likely children are to produce the plural inection themselves (Zapf 2004; see also Boyle and Gerken 1997). Several researchers have argued that children need to accumulate a certain number of types with the same inection to reach a critical mass of types before they can extract generalizations (e.g., Kuczaj and Borys 1988; Marchman and Bates 1994; Plunkett and Marchman 1993). Only once they reach that point can children set up a template or rule to apply to new cases (e.g., Behrens 2002; Ko pcke 1998). The two-year-olds studied here appeared not to have reached that point yet, but some of the three-year-olds had probably begun to generalize the plural sux (see Table 2).
5.5.
Learning to count
Young childrens attention to number begins early, with social activities such as distributing objects to others, tagging objects by pointing or touching each in turn, and turn-taking with actions like sitting on a chair. After those come inserting objects into slots, aligning objects with each other, and tagging actions by repeating a routine like Readysetgo before each repeat of the action (Durkin et al. 1986; Mix 2002; also Mix et al. 2002). Adults provide syntactic and semantic information along with number uses, cues that all point children towards the use of numbers for picking out absolute quantities of discrete individuals (Bloom and Wynn 1997). They consistently use numbers only with count nouns (e.g., two cats, but not two rice), always place numbers before adjectives (e.g., six red balls), use adjectives, but never numbers, with modiers like too or very, and use numbers in partitive constructions (e.g., four of the dogs).
135
At the same time, infants, small children, and other primates display some ability to keep track of up to three objects, but fail to distinguish three from four (e.g., Dehaene et al. 1998; Feigenson and Carey 2005). Interestingly, some languages lack numerals beyond three (Zaslavsky 1999), and there, people appear unable to count (e.g., Gordon 2004; see Gelman and Butterworth 2005; Gelman and Gallistel 2004). While a conceptual limit of three objects appears to aect childrens early attempts at counting, it doesnt appear to aect their uses of the plural sux or of nonconventional markers of more-than-one (see Figure 2). Although acquisition of plural forms for nouns is linked conceptually to the acquisition of number-word meanings, there appear to be two distinct systems involved in early development. For the plural, children need to learn the conventional device for contrasting just one with more-thanone. For counting, they need to master the precise meaning for each numeral along with principles for counting (see further Fuson 1988; Gelman and Gallistel 1978; Gelman and Meck 1983; Lipton and Spelke 2006; Pollman 2003; Sarnecka and Gelman 2004; Skwarchuk and Anglin 2002).
6.
Summary
In this article, we have explored one aspect of childrens early ability to distinguish one from more-than-one, and how they rst encode this distinction in language. As their language develops and they learn the conventional ways to mark this distinction, they also begin to integrate it with their growing knowledge of numbers and counting. Received 29 November 2005 Revised version received 26 June 2006 Notes
* This research was supported in part by the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. We thank the children, their families, and the teachers of the Bing Nursery School for their willing cooperation, and Lisa J. Higson for her help in collecting the data for Study 2. We are grateful to Susan Carey, Bruno Estigarribia, Steven Salter, and Dan I. Slobin for discussion and comment. Address for correspondence: Eve V. Clark, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 943052150, USA. Email: eclark@stanford.edu. 1. Ds word order tended to follow a given then new principle until around 1;10. Identication of /tu/ as two was made on diary-internal grounds; in fact too (as well as, in addition) only emerged later.
Stanford University
136
2. Note that counting at this stage did not involve any one-to-one correspondences between the objects being counted and the numerals produced in the count-sequence.
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One vs.

more than one: antecedents to plural marking in early language acquisition*

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

Early number concepts and counting

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina Study 1: early spontaneous plural marking in English

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

Figure 1. Sample pairs of pages

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Study 3: elicited responses to how many- and what-questions

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

Figure 2. Plurals ( What?) vs. numerals (How many?) by set size

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Choosing a form for a meaning

Antecedents to plural marking (34)

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina Piecemeal inections

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

Antecedents to plural marking

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