early plural comprehension?

[Gordon, Peter]

Susan Carey's group at Harvard esp. Mathieu LeCorre has been looking at
this a lot, and also David Barner.  From what I remember, the notion of
plural is first understood through verb-based constructions such as
"there are ...." versus "there is ..."  and only later becomes salient
as the -s marker on the noun.  Not sure if I have this right, but they
would have a better story on this.

Peter Gordon, Associate Professor
Biobehavioral Sciences Department
1152 Thorndike Hall
Teachers College, Columbia University
525 West 120th Street, Box 180
New York, NY 10027
http://www.tc.edu/faculty/pg328
Phone: (212) 678-8162
Lab: (212) 678-8169
FAX: (212) 678-8233

-----Original Message-----
From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
[mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Brian MacWhinney
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 11:17 PM
To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
Subject: early plural comprehension?

Dear Info-CHILDES,
    During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked
whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which
a child can comprehend the plural marker.  We were discussing the
findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with
reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12
months.  If this paradigm can be used to see if children can
distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see
if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?"
    We were particularly interested in information on the plural
marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically
transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially.  However,
evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would
also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed
further light on the comprehension-production lag during this
period.  Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference?  Many
thanks.

--Brian MacWhinney, CMU