early plural comprehension?

[Tom Roeper]

Dear Brian---

    Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult
things that a child must master.  It is not clear when its properties
are fully grasped at all.  To consider what the child faces, parents
easily say to a child, holding up a single banana,
    "do you like bananas?"
with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that?
    An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland,
Anderson, and Yatsushiro.   Following work by Anne  Vainnikka,
they asked children questions  like:
             Does a dog have tails?
Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes".

Tom Roeper

PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT)
I devote a long chapter to the topic. 

Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> 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
>
>