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

EVE V. CLARK AND TATIANA V. NIKITINA

Abstract

When children first mark distinctions in language, they may use seman-

tically possible but nonconventional expressions. This can be seen in their

initial attempts to express more-than-one in English (conventionally con-

veyed by use of the plural inflection). We explore childrens earliest ex-

pressions for more-than-one by (a) examining longitudinal records for

references to one vs. several objects, (b) eliciting references to pictures de-

picting one vs. two, three, or four objects, and (c) eliciting answers to what-

vs. 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 us-

ing 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 (twoduck); a few used quantifiers like more, and a few iteration with pointing

gestures (e.g., for three cats, cat POINT for each in turn). Knowledgeof plural marking was distinct from knowledge of counting: Two-year-olds

answered what questions with conventional or non-conventional plurals forup to nine objects, but managed how many-questions only for two or three,

did poorly with four or five, and typically failed to respond for six or more,

consistent with findings on the conceptual development of number.

1. Introduction

When children start to learn a first language, they have to discover which

linguistic distinctions are made in each language and which forms areused 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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(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 distinguishgiven information from what is new, information known personally

versus known by hearsay. They distinguish the roles played by the partic-

ipants in events (e.g., agent, patient, recipient, instrument, location, or

object-aected). And they distinguish one object or event from more-

than-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 first children try to

express. But since not all distinctions appear in a specific language, chil-

dren 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 first use a singleform 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 cer-

tain form or assign a nonconventional meaning to some forms, they pro-

vide evidence for some of the universal conceptual categories that under-

lie language, categories that are frequently obscured by language-specific

conventions of expression (Clark and Carpenter 1989a: 24).

1.1. Emergent categories

Emergent categories, then, are categories for which children try to find

some expression early in acquisition. Those that receive expression are ro-

bust 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 compat-ible form to convey a distinction, and only later discover the conventional

form or forms. Researchers have identified several emergent categories

to which children attempt to give linguistic expression early on, before

104 E. V. Clark and T. V. Nikitina

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acquisition of the conventional devices used by adult speakers. They in-

clude 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 com-parison, 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), filling in on a story: Daddy, the pigs have been

marooned from the rain.(2) 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.

Children learning English adopt the preposition from, first used for loca-

tive sources, to mark other sources as well, when these occur in non-

subject or noninitial position. Only later do these children learn the con-ventional 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 pos-

sessive -s for possessors, because for causes, or than to mark the standard

of comparison. The salience of sources as a group is reflected 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 first personpronoun, I and me, they may analyze them as marking control vs. ab-

sence of control, as in (3) and (4), where the first-person pronoun is

always used in self-reference:

(3) Child in control:

My cracked the eggs.

Me jump.

My taked it o.

(4) Child not in control: I like peas.

I want my3repair4 the blocks.

I no want those.

Antecedents to plural marking 105

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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 identification of subject vs. objectinstead.

With emergent categories, children look for forms to express concep-

tual distinctions. Sometimes a distinction goes unexpressed in their lan-

guage. 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 appro-

priate forms from the start. In the case of plural marking on nouns in En-

glish, we predict that if children try to express plurality one vs. more-

than-one before they have identified the appropriate inflections, 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 spe-

cific 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 marka specific distinction, across languages. For example, children acquiring

English begin to make use of the plural -s with two of its three allo-

morphs (/-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 five (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 distin-

guish collections from sets of individuals, as in Arabic: and, in fact, stud-

ies of children acquiring Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic show that theytake up to age 12 or later to master the full adult system for plural mark-

ing (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 isgrasped early, children may well try to express the notion of more-than-

one before they master the conventional forms for plurality in their lan-

guage. Do children latch onto the pertinent part of the inflectional system

from the start? Or do they adopt some other device first? We return to

this question after a brief consideration of childrens early number con-

cepts 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 distin-

guish between arrays of objects with small numbers, registering dier-

ences 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 suchdiscriminations as arrays get larger. At five to six months of age, in-

fants reliably distinguish one from two, three, or four items with indi-

vidual 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 com-

parisons 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 re-

trieve 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 findings strongly suggest thatinfants this age, and older, can spontaneously represent up to three ob-

jects 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 accompani-

ment to a repetitive action like going downstairs or picking up blocks.By age three, they appear to understand that each number in such a se-

quence designates some amount that increases the further on in the count

sequence one is. But they take time to learn the exact numerosity asso-

ciated 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 mor-pheme 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. Re-

searchers have documented several stages in acquisition with children ini-

tially making no use of plural inflections, 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 end-

ing word-by-word when they first begin to produce it, with frequency inchild-directed speech being one factor guiding their use (Lieven et al.

1997; Zapf 2004; Zapf and Smith 2003). This stage is followed by increas-

ing 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 mark-

ing 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

inflection itself.

But if children try to mark more-than-one before they acquire theconventional 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 Gilli-

gan 1988) and consistently acquired earlier than prefixes (Slobin 1973,

1985).Many fewer languages relied on prefixation instead (12%), and only

eight languages in the sample used reduplication (1%) the device

most similar to iteration. While reduplication keeps the noun stem in-

tact, it is rare, and other word-based options tend to obscure the stem

phonologically. This is important because children typically take up

first 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., open-

man (someone who opens things), sky-car (airplane), magic-man (magi-

cian), or car-smoke (exhaust) (Clark 1993). Of course, as children con-

tinually 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 classifiers

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-than-

one 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

quantifier and bare noun (more rabbit), or even the same noun iterated(rabbit-rabbit). The choice of specific numeral or quantifier 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 find 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 longitudinalobservations from a diary for one child and regular recordings for two

others, then extend our findings with the elicitation of plural forms from

young two- and three-year-olds.


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2. 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), inthe 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 findings for all three children suggest that their exposure to count se-

quences played a role in their initial attempts to mark plurality systemat-

ically, albeit nonconventionally, in their speech.

2.1. Diary observations of D

This diary, kept by the first author, contains daily observations with de-

tailed 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 exactlytwo objects, probably by accident, as in the first part of the next two

exchanges:

(6) D (1;9.9, carrying two blue racquetball balls upstairs to breakfast)

D: Herb racquetball two.

(7) 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 floor): other blanket floor.(then pulled the second blanket o the table, and dropped it too;

and, looking first down on one side, then on the other, at the two

blankets now on the floor) two blanket.


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The first 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. In-

deed, use of two as a plural marker overlapped with the emergence of the

conventional plural sux. His first 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 floor): a tape. (pointing)

a tape a floor (pointing down at the second piece). two tapes.

He continued to use two as a plural marker over the next four months, asin 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.

(12) D (2;0.15, playing with his magnets, holding three or four in hishand)

Father: how many magnets have you got?

D: two!

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 illus-

trated 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-fourhouses.

(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, five, six, seven, he now switched to one, three, four, five.... 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 inflection on nouns, with some overlap dur-

ing 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 pro-

duced by the child were imitations, and it is possible to glean some con-

textual information from the content of the adult utterances in each

exchange.

During the first 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 alsoto sets of three, four, and more objects. This suggests that, for the mo-

ment, 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.

(15) Mother: how many tinker-toys do you have?Eve (1;7): two tinker-toy.

(16) Mother: and on this farm he had some . . . .

Eve (1;8): MOO. MOO


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Mother: he had some cows . . . .

Eve: donkey.

Mother: donkeys.

Eve: two donkey. donkey.

Eves earliest plural forms, blocks (1;7) and cookies (1;8), were for the for-

merly 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, fingers, but con-

tinued 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 re-verted 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.

(19) Eve (1;9): e 3here here4 here two beads.

Father: two?

Eve: yeah.Father: how many beads are there?

Eve: two bead.

Eves uses of two with bare and inflected 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 crack-

ers, two pocketbooks, as well as with bare nouns (e.g., two knife, twonoodle-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 touse 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 flowers, two houses). She also began to

use other numbers with plural nouns (e.g., three girls, seven horses, five

doggies). And from 2;2, she began to use count-sequences in answering

how many-questions, as in (20) and (21):

(20) Adult: how many dyou have?

Eve (2;2): two, three.(21) 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 indi-

cate amount, but she has yet to fix 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 first 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 ap-

parent plural-marker, only in combination with bare nouns. Among hismany 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 nu-

meral two in combination with nouns, even though he produced several

other numerals in his count-sequences. Around 2;6, the plural ending be-

came 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 dog-

gies, 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 witha 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 an-

swering how many-questions, as shown in (22)(24). Earlier, he consis-

tently produced two in answering such questions.

(22) Adult: and what else?

Adam (2;8.16): ear.

Adult: how many?

Adam: three.(23) Mother: tell me how many balls you have there.

Adam (2;9.18): three.

Mother: three? ok, you count, and let me see.

(24) Mother: how many?

Adam (2;9.18): three.

Mother: three! I saw more than three.

On other occasions, Adam answered such questions with part of a count-

sequence, 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.

(26) Adult: how many pencils did you put in there?

Adam (2;5.12): four, eight, nine.

(27) Mother: how many?

Adam (2;11.28): three, four, five, six.

Mother: how many?

Adam: three, four, five, six.

Mother: oh, my goodness. What happened to one, two, three?

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 first, 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 afew 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 nu-

meral 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 nu-

merals 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 tohow many-questions, as shown in (22)(24). Both Eve and Adam made

some uses of other modifiers 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) Adam (2;9.18): lie down timeanap.

put some pillows on it.

(29) Eve (1;11) Sueaget some pictures.

Mother: wella these were gonna send to Granny.

Eve: Suea let me . . . .Mother: Moms just put stamps on them.

More appeared throughout with bare nouns for both children, nearly al-

ways in requests where the child did not currently have the object re-

quested, 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): Fraserano more squirrels.

In short, they did not use more in the way they did two, to mark the pres-

ence of more-than-one.

These observations of spontaneous use from three young children sug-

gest that they go down the following path as they move from nonconven-

tional to conventional marking of the plural for more-than-one in their

speech:

(a) They first 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 first count-


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sequences and so might be said to be semantically quite appropri-

ate for the expression more-than-one.

(b) They exhibit piecemeal acquisition of the conventional plural suf-

fix, 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.

(c) 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.

(d) They start making use of terms other than numerals in combina-

tion 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 redun-

dant plural marking, with any consistency. In earlier research, Nicolaci-

da-Costa and Harris (1983) noted that adults often used redundant plural

marking in the form of deictic these or those, quantifiers like many, and

numerals before plural nouns, in speech to young children. Unfortu-

nately, in the present data for Eve and for Adam, adult uses of the child-

rens earliest plural nouns in the transcripts were too infrequent for such

an analysis. At the same time, it is clear that there were both redundantand nonredundant uses in parental speech: For instance, Eves early plu-

ral 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?

Eveayou 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 first before you play with the

bouillon cubes.

Put the blocks away first.

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:


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(33) You xxx more cookies?

No more cookiesaEve.

Christmas tree cookiesauh-huh.

Icinga for the cookies.Im making cookiesaEve.

Im decorating the cookies.

Im icing the cookiesaEve.

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 estab-

lishing 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 many-

questions). And, as Wynn (1992) pointed out, once children have identi-

fied 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 thatthe 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 in-

dicating any knowledge of number; they are merely verbal routines asso-

ciated with activities like going up stairs, building blocks into towers, or

putting sets of objects away.

3. Study 2: elicited production and comprehension of nonconventionaland 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 appropriatepicture. 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 findings suggest that multiply-marked plural forms should be easier than those marked only with the

plural noun inflection, -s. And children should be ahead in comprehen-

sion over production (Clark and Hecht 1983).

In production, they might first 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-than-one? 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 inflec-

tion 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 first four picture pairs were warm-

up items, with the same ones used in both books (one vs. two beds, fourlights 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 pic-

tures 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 first 200300 words in two-year-old vocabulary

norms established by the MacArthur Communicative Development In-

ventory (Fenson et al. 1994).

Both books contained the same picture pairs, but the 16 test pairs ineach 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 first 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 il-lustrated 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 ques-

tions 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 first asked the child to find 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 alsorequiring 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 final 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? [correct answer, 4]

(b) How many blocks are there? [correct answer, 3]

This was to check on whether children produced any specialized forms

just in response to how many-questions, and to find 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, aswere 8 of the two-year-olds. The remaining twos were either younger sib-

lings 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 first 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 aparent 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 out-

side 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 re-

sponses in both tasks.

3.2. Results

To what extent have two- and three-year-olds mapped their representa-

tion of one instance vs. more-than-one to conventional devices for indi-

cating plurality in English? We present the data on comprehension first,

for both age groups, although this was always the second task, before we

take up our findings 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 three-

year-olds, and the two-year-olds responses tended to be harder to inter-

pret because they would at times choose both pages (one hand on each),

or point first 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 singularnoun, 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 re-

quests 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 onenonresponse 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


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more-than-one in response to the other three request types. This may

have underestimated the younger childrens ability to understand the sin-

gular (57% correct) compared to the plural (65%), in part for the follow-

ing 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 significant. 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 de-

pended to some extent on their familiarity with the words used for the ob-

jects pictured. (There was variation from one child to the next in which

words were interpreted appropriately.) The slightly (but not significantly)

better performance by two-year-olds on plural nouns could also reflectthe fact that children learn some nouns in plural form first 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 inflection

make any dierence to comprehension? The answer appears to be no.

Overall, two-year-olds did slightly better on plural nouns without numer-als (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-than-

one: they treated plural inflections 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.

Table 1. Percentage of correct comprehension responses by age

Age N Noun-sg Noun-pl Numeral N-pl Numeral N-sg

2;0 17 57 76 54 663;0 13 90 88 88 92

Mean 72 82 69 78

Note: For 2s, each percentage is based on 68 data points; and for 3s, on 52 data points.


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(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 plu-

ral 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 identified 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 onomatopoeicterms (6%), color terms (2%), and occasional use of terms like other or

that (8%), none of which could be reliably identified as a plural marking.

The three-year-olds produced the appropriate singular forms for pic-

tures 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 two-

year-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 inflection on nouns, and for early

Table 2. Percentage of correct and incorrect singular and plural forms produced, by age

Age N Conventional Incorrect No response

Singular Plural Singular Plural Singular Plural

2;0 12 65 47 22 42 12.5 11

3;0 13 82 74 8 25 1 2

Note: Percentages for 2s are based on 192 data points, and for 3s on 208 data points.


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noun and verb inflections in general (see Elsen 1997; Gathercole et al.

1999; Kopcke 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 more-

than-one. They made use of two main strategies here. In the first, 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 iter-

ations 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 five two-year-

olds 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 two-

year-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 inflec-tion to the bare noun.

We had expected that children might also rely on other quantifiers like

more or another to indicate more-than-one. But only 4 three-year-olds

did this: they combined the quantifier 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-specific, uses in plural con-

texts) sometimes rely on other means in production to contrast the mean-

ing more-than-one with just one. Six children at times simply iteratedthe 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 plu-

ral -s inflection on nouns.

Lastly, in carrying out this study, we asked two follow-up questionsat 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 re-

sponse to one or both questions, but their counts were generally wrong,

with most consisting only of the sequence one, two. The remaining twosgave 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 re-

sponses from threes consisted of single numbers (e.g., three for four don-

keys, also for three blocks), or a numeral and noun combination (e.g.,

four horses).

These findings suggest that children learn to respond to How many-

questions 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-year-

olds appeared to stop at either two or three, while three-year-olds could

produce counts that went up to four or five, and occasionally six. (How-

ever, 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 fix 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 one-

to 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 de-

cided to contrast What- and How many-questions by presenting childrenwith dierent numbers of objects in each set to be considered in order to

find 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 twoor of many more objects, should simply elicit a plural form of the relevant

noun (either with -s or with a nonconventional expression for more-than-

one), 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 failwith 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 five 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 specific

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 tableor on the floor, 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 first 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, five

small solid rubber balls, eight miniature crayons, and nine small train en-gines, 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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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 dif-

ferences 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 pluralending 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 an-

swer 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 many-

questions with numerals.

We then compared the patterns of plural and numeral uses acrossthe dierent numbers of objects in the boxes. As predicted for What-

questions, there were no significant dierences in the numbers of plurals

supplied for two to three objects, four to five objects, or eight to nine ob-

jects. 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 five 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 five objects (33% and 42% respectively); theynever did so for eight or nine objects. Their responses to the two question

types by set size, displayed in Figure 2, diered significantly (X22 223:64, p < 0:0001).

Table 3. Contents of each box compartment

2 plastic cubes 4 plastic donkeys 9 small train-engines

8 small crayons 3 plastic dogs 5 small rubber balls


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How accurate was their use of numerals and counts? Not very. Whenchildren 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 five 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 five, and 17% of the time (one child) for eight or nine

objects.

This suggests that their counting at age two consists primarily of count-

ing routines, without any real knowledge of the rules for counting (Gel-man and Meck 1983). And at a stage when they know only short count-

sequence routines, they have a greater probability of getting the count

right for small sets. Many of the children also pointed (with touch point-

ing) 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 numeralsand counts for sets larger than three, suggests that they master the con-

ceptual 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.

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


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But for the linguistic distinction between singular and plural, it is the con-

ceptual dierence between one and more-than-one that children try to

express in their language even before they have identified the conven-

tional 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 reflect 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 lin-

guistic expression in other languages). In such cases, young children may

try to make a linguistic distinction that is simply absent from the lan-

guage 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 oerrevealing 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 cap-

tured in the adult distinction at stake. They present evidence for the sa-

lience of some conceptual categories early on, categories that underlie

widespread linguistic distinctions. They may also reveal the routes chil-

dren 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 ex-

pression that appears to be semantically compatible with the distinction

they are trying to express. In the case of sources, for example, they typi-

cally pick up on the locative source preposition from (Clark and Carpen-

ter 1989a). And in the case of emergent plurals, as shown here, they pickup on the numeral two for more-than-one. In a similar way, children may

pick up on a term like spoonful, first used in contexts like that in (34) and

then extended to mean a lot of in utterances like those in (35) and (36):


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(34) Mo (talking about Ds cereal, oatmeal): Ill have to give you some

more.

D (1;11.30): more. A BIG spoonful.

(35) D (2;0.14, displaying a handful of magnets): Damon have aspoonful magnets.

(36) 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 prelimi-

nary solutions for contrasting one with more-than-one are all analytic

rather than synthetic, so the added element (a numeral, a quantifier, 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 mean-

ings of free morphemes are more easily identified 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 transpar-

ent, and this makes them available for expressing that meaning in othercontexts.

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: quantifiers like a lot of,

heaps of, all, some; plural demonstratives like these and those, and numer-

als like two, three, and four. Three- to four-year-olds, in fact, do much

better in comprehension when they hear redundant marking for more-

than-one than when they hear only the plural sux on nouns (Nicolaci-da-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, sug-

gest 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 morefrequently 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 significantly dierent pat-

tern, and now paralleled the frequencies in adult usage.

Lastly, another factor that may contribute to the choice of two in En-

glish is that phonologically, two is the only low-value numeral that con-tains no fricative consonant until one reaches eight, nine, or ten in English

count sequences. Compare three, four, five, six, and seven. This account is

lent some support from Swedish where children pick on atta eight as a

plural marker (e.g., atta hund eight dog), again a numeral containing a

stop (Hakansson 1998). At the same time, atta would appear much later

in count sequences than English two, and we have no information about

the relative frequencies of dierent low-value numerals in Swedish.

These findings are all consistent with our finding that when children ac-

quiring English rely on a numeral to mark more-than-one, they typically

choose two, the most frequently used numeral for more-than-one in pa-

rental speech, for this purpose.

5.2. Conceptual categories

Emergent categories also oer evidence for the salience of conceptual cate-

gories in childrens early attempts to find forms to express certain mean-ings (Clark 2001). Some researchers have argued that childrens concep-

tual categories are shaped from the start by adult usage (e.g., Bowerman

1985; Choi and Bowerman 1991), while others have proposed that chil-

dren rely first on whatever conceptual categories they have already estab-

lished as they move into language towards the end of their first 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 in-

teracts with the language they are exposed in the early stages of acquisi-

tion. While their initial attempts to express certain distinctions may be

driven by the conceptual salience of a specific distinction, they also at-

tend, from early on, to adult usage. And as they hear more language

from adults, they learn more themselves and adjust their own uses of lin-

guistic forms to conform to the adult usage around them.

5.3. Alternate routes

Do all children follow the same path as they acquire a first 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 deicticcentre (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 first

pronouns to be acquired (Oshima-Takane et al. 1996). Second born chil-

dren learn the shifting nature of first- and second-person pronouns I is

always the speaker and you the addressee more quickly than firstborn

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 quitedistinct routes to adult-like mastery. One child they observed focused on

the general locative verb mettre to put combined with locative prepo-

sitional phrases like sur la table, dans la maison, etc. The other child

began by acquiring locative verbs with more specific 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 lexi-

cally specific 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 first child used the general verb mettre muchmore frequently than more specific locative verbs in talking about caused

motion and location, while the mother of the second favored locative

verbs with more specific meanings. In English too, as children start to

use verbs with specific constructions, they first 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 specific path each

child follows at particular points during acquisition. The general basisfor such dierences most likely resides in the dierent linguistic experi-

ences children are exposed to from the start (e.g., Hart and Risley

1995).


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5.4. Piecemeal inflections

The present findings also support the view that learning to produce the

plural sux is a gradual aair, involving piecemeal, word-by-word ac-quisition (e.g., Lieven et al. 1997; Mervis and Johnson 1991). This is

consistent with observations across a variety of languages where children

display lexically specific patterns in their first uses of noun and verb in-

flections, followed by relatively slow extensions of the same inflection 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 inflection themselves (Zapf 2004; see also Boyle and Gerken

1997).

Several researchers have argued that children need to accumulate a cer-

tain number of types with the same inflection 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; Kopcke 1998). The two-year-olds stud-ied 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 ortouching 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 be-

fore 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, butnot two rice), always place numbers before adjectives (e.g., six red balls),

use adjectives, but never numbers, with modifiers like too or very, and use

numbers in partitive constructions (e.g., four of the dogs).


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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 (Zaslavsky1999), 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 plu-

ral 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-than-

one. For counting, they need to master the precise meaning for each nu-

meral 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 first encode this dis-

tinction in language. As their language develops and they learn the con-

ventional ways to mark this distinction, they also begin to integrate it

with their growing knowledge of numbers and counting.

Received 29 November 2005 Stanford University

Revised version received

26 June 2006

Notes

* This research was supported in part by the Center for the Study of Language and Infor-

mation, 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, Ste-

ven Salter, and Dan I. Slobin for discussion and comment. Address for correspondence:

Eve V. Clark, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2150, USA. Email: [email protected].

1. Ds word order tended to follow a given then new principle until around 1;10. Identi-

fication of/tu/ as two was made on diary-internal grounds; in fact too (as well as, in

addition) only emerged later.


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2. Note that counting at this stage did not involve any one-to-one correspondences be-

tween the objects being counted and the numerals produced in the count-sequence.

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