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More and more and more about more

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY 40, 73-104 (1985) More and More and More about More Deparfrnenr VIRGINIA C. GATHERCOLE of English, ...

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JOURNAL

OF EXPERIMENTAL

CHILD

PSYCHOLOGY

40, 73-104 (1985)

More and More and More about More

Deparfrnenr

VIRGINIA

C. GATHERCOLE

of English,

Florida

International

University

Three experiments explored the development of three linguistic aspects of snore in children’s speech. Subjects were 56 children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. Experiment I addressed the nature of the early semantic content of more. Experiment 2 examined the child’s differentiation of mass more from count more. Experiment 3 explored the child’s use of more as a comparative marker on adjectives. The results suggest, first. that the child initially stores the meaning of more with a prototype, rather than with some more systematic, featural representation. In addition, children’s linguistic understanding of the dual use of more as a quantifier of mass amounts and count amounts does not appear to develop until long after they have been using more appropriately in unambiguous contexts. Finally. children learn to use more as a marker on comparatives only after they have acquired -er as a comparative marker, and some time after they have been using more successfully in nonadjectival constructions. c 1985 Academic Press.

Inc.

A considerable amount of child language literature has touched on the acquisition of more, yet our understanding of how the child gains an adultlike command of this word remains quite fragmentary. First, we still do not know how the child first encodes the semantics of “comparative more”-i.e., more when it means “greater in amount.” Studies of the one- and two-word stages of development (Bloom, 1970, 1973; Brown, 1973) have indicated that most children use more early, but they use it to request or remark on the recurrence of an object or event. There does not appear to be a direct link between this early use of more and the later use of more for “greater in amount” (Weiner, 1974). Several hypotheses about the early semantic entry for the “greater in amount” This research was partially supported by DHEW Research Service Award HD 07066 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Kansas Center for Mental Retardation and Human Development. I express my appreciation to Kenneth F. Ruder for his guidance in the preparation of this study and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks are also due to the teachers, parents. and children from Children’s Learning Center, Creative World Preschool. Hilltop Child Care Center, and Raintree Montessori School. Send requests for reprints to Virginia C. Gathercole. Department of English, Florida International University. Miami. FL 33199. 73 0022-0965185 $3 .OO Copyright Q 1985 by Academic Prer\. Inc. All rights of reproduction m any form reserved.

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meaning of more have been proposed as corollaries of the hypotheses that at an immature stage of development less means “more,” [ + Amount, +Polar], or [+Amountl (E. Clark, 1973a, 1973b, 1975; H. Clark, 1970). Since those hypotheses have proven inadequate in accounting for the acquisition of less (Carey, 1978a; Gordon, 1978; Kavanaugh, 1976; Townsend, 1974, 1976; Trehub & Abramovitch, 1978; Wannemacher & Ryan, 1978; Weiner, 1974), they have provided little insight into the acquisition of comparative more. There have been some recent suggestions that comparative more is learned first in connection with “sequential” comparisons of amounts in the same referent before it is used in connection with “simultaneous” comparisons of amounts in distinct referents (Gitterman & Johnston, 1983; Hudson, Guthrie, & Santilli, 1982). but this hypothesis has not gone unchallenged (Finch-Williams, 1981). Even if it proved to be correct, however, it leaves open the question of the nature of the child’s semantic entry for this word. Besides not knowing how the child learns that more means “greater in amount,” we have very little information about how the child gains an adultlike command of other linguistically significant aspects and uses of more. First, the child must learn that comparative more sometimes refers to an item, or set of items, that has greater overall mass than another and sometimes to a set that has a greater number. In addition, the child must learn that more, like -er, can act as a comparative marker on adjectives-in particular, polysyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives. The purpose of this study was to explore the development of these linguistic aspects of more and to investigate how their acquisition might be interrelated. GENERAL

METHOD

Subjects

The subjects for these experiments were 56 children (25 females, 31 males) between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. The children fell into seven age groups, with eight in each group. The ages for the seven groups were as follows: The 2&year-olds ranged from 2;6 to 2;11, with a mean age of 2;lO; the 3-year-olds ranged from 3;0 to 3;4, with a mean age of 3;2; the 3&year-olds ranged from 3;7 to 3;11, with a mean age of 3;9; the 4year-olds ranged from 4;l to 4;5, with a mean age of 4;3; the 4&yearolds ranged from 4;6 to 4;11, with a mean age of 4;8; the 5-year-olds ranged from 5;O to 5;5, with a mean age of 5;3; and the St-year-olds ranged from 5;7 to 5;9, with a mean age of 5;8. Fifty-one of the children were enrolled in four different preschools in Lawrence, Kansas. All but seven of these were tested at school, in a room set aside for the purpose of testing. The remaining seven children from the schools and five others were tested in their homes. Parents were invited to observe the sessions, but only seven mothers chose to do so, most of them for only one or

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two sessions. All of the children English.

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were normal,

monolingual

speakers of

General Procedure

Each child was seen on four different occasions spread over a minimum of 4 days and a maximum of 25 days. (The mean number of days was 10.5.) Three experiments were administered. Experiment 1 was divided into two parts, which were administered in two consecutive sessions; Experiments 2 and 3 were each administered during a single session. The order of testing for Experiments 1 and 2 was balanced across and within age groups, and Experiment 3 was always administered between the two. Thus, half the subjects were tested in the order Experiments 1, 3, 2, and the other half in the order 2. 3, 1. This was done to minimize the effects of Experiments 1 and 2 on each other. The order of testing for the two parts of Experiment 1 was also balanced both across and within age groups, such that half the children received Part 1 first and half Part 2 first. All responses were recorded in writing and on tape. Sessions were taped for the purpose of rechecking hand-recorded data. However, the tapes also provided information on the children’s spontaneous use of adjectival forms, which proved useful for Experiment 3. EXPERIMENT

1

Experiment 1 addressed the question of children’s early semantic representation of comparative more. Do children learn the meaning of comparative more by adding features to their lexical entries in an ordered sequence, or do they acquire its meaning in some less systematic fashion? Although it is by now clear that children do not learn the meaning of less as predicted by the full and partial semantic feature hypotheses (E. Clark, 1973a, 1973b, 1975), this does not preclude the possibility that children acquire the meaning of more through a process of semantic feature acquisition. Indeed, this possibility is made plausible with the suggestion (Gordon, 1978) that the important linguistic properties shared by more and less are learned first in conjunction with more and are then transferred in toto to less. (See Carey, 1978a; and Gordon, 1978, for evidence that the meaning of more is indeed learned before that of less, and Palermo, 1973, and Harasym, Boersma, & Maguire, 1971, for evidence that less is learned “with an insightful suddenness” (Palermo, 1973, p. 219), as this hypothesis would predict.) Alternatively, young children might learn more in a less systematic fashion. They may accumulate and store haphazard examples of comparative more, consistent with Carey’s (1978b) theory, or they may learn comparative more initially in conjunction with a prototypical referent, consistent with Bowerman’s (1978) theory of the acquisition of word meaning.

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Experiment 1 was designed primarily to explore these alternative possibilities. In addition, Experiment 1 was designed to provide some initial information on the acquisition of more with mass vs count quantities (to be complemented by the data of Experiment 2). If children represent the meaning of more in terms of systematic semantic features, that representation could, theoretically, be fully adultlike from the start. However, experiments that have been constructed to reveal potential deficiencies in children’s understanding of more have indicated immature stages of development at which the child’s understanding is not yet complete (Donaldson & McGarrigle. 1974; Gordon, 1978; Grieve & Dow, 1981). An immature featural representation could take any of several distinct forms. To consider the possibilities, let us reconsider the feature specification for more in the adult lexicon. Researchers have generally treated the defining features for more as [ + Amount, + Polar], with its antonym, less, specified as [ + Amount, -Polar]. However, [ + Amount, + Polar] appears to more properly define a lot. and [ + Amount, -Polar] a little. Because more and fess are comparative, we could add a feature [ + Comparative] to the features of amount and polarity, to differentiate them from c1 lot and a little. [ + Comparative] indicates, first, that more and less, unlike a lot and a little, do not refer to an amount exemplified in a single referent, but to one of two distinct amounts exemplified in relatable referents. (I wiil refer to this with the feature [ +ReIational].) In addition, [ + Comparative] indicates that those two relatable referents show the property in question to different degrees, or they contrast. With these three defining features for more, along with the feature [ + Relational] entailed by [ + Comparative], we can logically hypothesize the following forms for the child’s early partial entry for more. First, the child might know that more refers to [ + Amount]. This is the position taken by E. Clark (1973a, 1973b, 1975) in her full and partial semantic feature hypotheses. Second, the child’s early semantic feature representation of more might be [ +Polar]. This possibility has been proposed by Gordon (1978), who noted that his subjects’ incorrect responses to more consisted largely of choices of three-dimensional over two-dimensional items, bigger over smaller items, and heterogeneous sets of colors, shapes, or types over homogeneous sets (cf. Grieve & Dow, 1981, however). As Gordon notes, this ties in with work (Bartlett, 1976; Brewer & Stone, 1975; Carey, 1978b) that indicates that in the child’s acquisition of spatial adjectives, the relevant polar feature is filled in for each adjective long before the appropriate dimensional feature. A third possible early entry for comparative more is a combination of these two features [ + Amount, + Polar]. This would be equivalent to more meaning “a lot,” a possibility suggested by Weiner (1974). A fourth possibility is that more means [ +Comparative]. It has been assumed in some studies that the child

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knows that more refers to a difference between two items (e.g., Donaldson & McGarrigle, 1974, p. 193), while in others, it has been hypothesized that the comparative nature of more is learned late (e.g., H. Clark, 1970). A fifth partial semantic feature entry for more is [ + Relational]. That is, the child may first learn that more is used in contexts where two items, or two instances of the same item, are involved. If so, the child should never apply more to a single object or stimulus in isolation. The logical possibilities remaining all involve combinations of these features. If the child learns the meaning of tnore through a process of adding semantic features to his mental entry for the word, the more complex representations would entail the child’s prior acquisition of the individual semantic components. Furthermore, the evidence needed to support a multifeatured immature entry for more includes the evidence needed to support the presence of the individual features. For these reasons, the investigation of the semantic feature hypotheses focuses on the five possible entries outlined above. Under any of the above hypotheses, there is at least one semantic characteristic that is common to all the child’s uses of more. The haphazard examples and prototype hypotheses, in contrast, predict that the child may use more less consistently. According to Carey’s (1978b) theory, the child is hypothesized to initially accumulate and store haphazard examples of uses of words being learned, and only later to extract systematic semantic information from these examples. The child’s earliest uses of a word might, thus, show inconsistencies, due to the child’s reliance on the stored haphazard examples in his application of that word. Under this theory, in the child’s lexical entry for more, one stored example might indicate that it is used in reference to the relative fullness of glasses of milk, another might refer to the relative lengths of two lines of cars, yet another to the relative numbers of pieces of candy. The appropriate uses of more stored in these haphazard examples would only later be abstracted out and stored in more integrated and more systematic semantic units, or “lexical organizers.” This type of immature lexical entry for more would allow for the correct use of more in some contexts, but lead to its incorrect use in others. The second alternative to an immature featural representation for more is that the child first learns more with a prototype. This hypothesis, like the last, would allow for inconsistency across children’s uses of more, but in this case inconsistencies could arise as the child overextended more on the basis of nonintersecting subsets of the features of that prototype. (Various theorists differ on whether those characteristics might be stored holistically in the prototype or in some analyzed, featural form. See Greenberg & Kuczaj, 1982, for discussion.) For example, if children learned more in relation to a prototype that embodies certain features. they may overextend more “complexively,” or on the basis of any subset

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of those features, just as they overextend other words complexively (Bower-man, 1978). If, for example, more is learned in relation to a prototype that embodies the features of application to the greater ([ + Polar]) of two compared ([ + Comparative]) amounts ([ + Amount]), as well as, perhaps, application to an amount that fills a container, or shows great length, or shows a dense composition, the child may use more in cases in which only a subset of these characteristics is relevant. Thus, in one instance more may be applied to a simple amount and appear to mean “some”; in another, it may be applied to a great amount ([ +Amount, i-polar]) and appear to mean “a lot”; in yet another it may be applied to the fuller of two containers and appear to mean not greater amount, but greater fullness. Besides allowing for inconsistencies across the child’s uses of more, the prototype hypothesis could also account for any preferred uses of more, such as those observed by Donaldson and McGarrigle (1974). The child’s preference for applying more to fullness over length, and to length over density might reflect not hierarchically ordered local rules for the application of more in given contexts, as these authors suggested, but, rather, the relative importance of the meaning components of the prototypical more. Bowerman has argued that at least in some cases of the acquisition of word meaning with a prototype, certain features of the prototype appear to be “more central or concept-defining . . . than others” (Bowerman, 1978, p. 282). Method

Materials Two sets of stimuli were designed in which all, a subset, or none of the features [ + Amount], [ + Polar], [ + Comparative], and [ + Relational] were applicable. One set of stimuli was prepared to test more in relation to mass quantities, another to test more in relation to countable quantities. Half the children in each age group were randomly assigned to the mass condition, the other half to the count condition. For mass, balls of clay and bags of sand were used. For count, candles and Christmas tree balls were used. In the case of the mass objects, one of three amounts was used in stimuli: “small” amounts of clay weighed 1 oz and measured 3.5 cm in diameter; “large amounts weighed 2 oz and measured 4.5 cm in diameter; “very large” amounts weighed 4 oz and measured 5.5 cm in diameter. “Small” amounts of sand measured 4 cup, “large” amounts measured 4 cup, and “very large” amounts measured 1 full cup. In the case of count objects, two sizes were used: “small” balls measured 2.5 cm in diameter; “large” balls measured 6 cm in diameter. “Small” candles measured 5.5 cm long x 0.2 cm in diameter (birthday candle size); “large” candles measured 12.5 cm long x 2 cm in diameter. Mass stimuli were presented on 8 x ll-in (20.3 x 28 cm) sheets of white

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paper; countable quantities were glued to 6 x 6-in. (15.2 x 15.2 cm) or 8 x g-in. (20.3 x 20.3 cm) boards. For each condition (mass, count), stimulus items for four types of tasks were prepared. The stimuli in the first type (“single sets”) consisted of single sets of items (where “set” refers to the clay, sand, balls, or candles presented on a single sheet of paper or board). The second type (“equivalent amounts”) contained pairs of sets showing equivalent amounts. The third type (“differing amounts”) consisted of pairs of sets showing distinct amounts. In Task 1 of the single sets, a stimulus with no amount of the item was shown; in Task 2, a small amount of the relevant item was shown: and in Task 3, a large amount of the relevant item was shown. For the equivalent amounts, either the sets were identical, or they differed in some way other than amount. In Task 4, identical small amounts were shown; in Task 5, identical large amounts were shown; in Task 6, the sets differed in heterogeneity (one set consisted of variously colored stimuli, the other uniformly colored stimuli); in Task 7, the sets differed in dimensionality (Zdimensional vs 3-dimensional); and in Task 8, they differed in whether they filled a container. The ditfering amounts consisted of pairs of stimuli that differed either only in amount or both in amount and in some other way. In Task 9, the sets differed by a small amount; in Task 10, they differed by a large amount; in Tasks 11 and 12, the amount difference interacted with a difference in size or number (in Task 11, the set with the larger overall mass was also the set with greater number; in Task 12, the set with greater overall mass had fewer items): in Tasks 13 and 14, amount differences interacted positively and negatively, respectively, with heterogeneity; in Tasks 15 and 16, amount differences interacted positively and negatively, respectively, with dimensionality; and in Tasks 17 and 18, amount differences interacted positively and negatively, respectively, with fullness. In Tasks 6 to 18, the location of the “correct” set on the left or right was randomized. The fourth type of task, an “iterative more” task, consisted of 10 sets of stimuli presented at once. These sets were placed in two horizontal parallel lines of five sets each. The five sets in a line differed in graduated amounts. For example, for balls, sets with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 balls were presented. The sets in the lower line were placed so that sets stood in one-to-one correspondence with the equivalent sets of the top line. Procedure Experiment 1 was administered in two parts: Part 1 consisted of Tasks 1 to 9; Part 2 consisted of Tasks 10 to 18 and the iterative more task. The use of clay or sand for any given task in the mass condition and the use of candles or balls for any given task in the count condition was randomized. Likewise, with the exception of the single sets and iterative

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more tasks, the order of presentation of the items within each part was randomized. The iterative more task was always administered at the end of Part 2. The single set tasks were never administered after a task in which the same substance was used without at least two intervening tasks in which the other substance of that condition was used. This constraint was enforced to guard against a child’s use of the stimuli of a preceding task as a standard of comparison for the single stimulus of each of the single set tasks. For the single set tasks, children were asked “Does this have more X?” For equivalent and differing amounts tasks, children were asked “Does one of these have more X?” and, if they responded in the affirmative, “Which one?” For the iterative more task, the experimenter pointed to the medium amount in the top row-e.g., for count, the set with 3 balls or candles in the top row-and asked “Is there any that has more X than this one?” Children who responded in the affirmative were then asked “Which one?” These questions were followed further by “Is there any other that has more X than this one ?” Again, children who responded in the affirmative were asked to identify which one. This questioning continued until the child either responded in the negative or had identified every set as having more than the standard of comparison. The following patterns of responses in Tasks I to 18 would be consistent with the hypothesized semantic featural entries for more: (1) [ + Amount] (i.e., more means “some”): In response to “Does this/one of these have more X?” the child should answer in the affirmative for all tasks except Task 1. Choice of either set in the equivalent and differing amounts tasks would be consistent with this hypothesis. (2) [ + Polar]: Assuming Gordon’s (1978) interpretation of [ + Polar], the child should respond in the affirmative to “Does this/one of these have more X?” in Tasks 3 and 5 and 6 through 18. [ +Polar] choices for these consist of either set for Task 5, the heterogeneous, three-dimensional, and full sets in Tasks 6 to 8, either set in Tasks 12, 14, 16. and 18, and the greater amount in Tasks 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, and 17. (3) [+Amount, +Polar]: The child should respond in the affirmative to “Does this/one of these have more X?” in Tasks 3, 5, and 9 through 18. [ +Amount, +Polar] choices consist of either set in Task 5, and the greater amount in Tasks 9 to 18. (4) [ + Relational]: The child should respond in the affirmative to “Does this/one of these have more X.7” in Tasks 4 through 18. Choice of either set in all of these tasks would be appropriate. (5) [ + Comparative]: The child should respond in the affirmative to “Does this/one of these have more X?” in Tasks 6 through 18. Again, the choice of either set in all of these tasks would be appropriate. RESULTS

AND DISCUSSION

Children’s performance on the first three task types at each age is shown in Table 1. Analysis of variance of the responses to Tasks 1 to

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ABOUT TABLE

ACCURACY

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AGE ON SINGLE SETS, EQUIVALENT AMOUNTS, AND DIFFERING

AT EACH

AMOUNTS,

EXPERIMENT

I

Tasks Group”

Single sets

Equivalent amounts

Differing amount?

Total

25 3 36 4 46 5 5b Total

25.0 41.7 54.2 62.5 75.0 87.5 75.0 60.12

5.0 12.5 32.5 27.5 60.0 57.5 57.5 36.07

40.0 30.0 91.25 92.5 88.75 95.0 96.25 76.25

27.78 27.08 68.75 69.44 78.47 83.33 81.94 62.40

” N = 8 for each group. ’ Percentages represent correct responses to both questions (“Does one of these have more X?” and “Which one?“) of the differing amounts tasks. The percentages of responses that consisted of affirmative answers to the first question, but incorrect choices were as follows: Age 24: 43.8%; 3: 56.3%; 39: 3.75%; 4: 6.3%: 44: 3.75%; 5: 5%: 5;: 3.75%.

18 revealed a significant main effect of age (F(6, 42) = 15.3, p < .OOl), with the most dramatic improvement occurring between the ages of 3 and 34. There was also a significant difference in performance on the first three types of tasks (F(2, 84) = 38.1, p < .OOl), such that performance was best on the differing amounts tasks, next best on the single set tasks, and worst on the equivalent amounts tasks. In addition, there was a significant difference in the accuracy of the children in the mass vs count conditions (F(1, 42) = 36.4, p < .OOl) and a significant two-way interaction between tasks and condition (F(2, 84) = 4.6, p < .025). Subjects’ performance in each condition on the three types of tasks is shown in Table 2. There was not a significant two-way interaction between conditions and age, nor between tasks and age. A three-way interaction between tasks, conditions, and age was not significant. Further analysis revealed that the order of presentation across experiments and across Parts 1 and TABLE PERCENTAGE

2

CORRECT RESPONSES IN THE MASS AND COUNT

Task type Single sets Equivalent amounts Differing amounts Total

--______-

Mass 51.2 15.0 68.2 50.6

CONDITIONS,

EXPERIMENT

Count -__~---______.~ 69.1 57.1 84.3 74.2

1

Total 60.1 36. I 76.3 62.4

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2 of Experiment 1 did not significantly affect subjects’ responses. x2 analyses of choices of heterogeneous vs homogeneous sets, of filled vs unfilled containers, of the correct sets in Tasks 9 and 10, and of threedimensional vs two-dimensional sets revealed significant differences for only the last of these. The choice of three-dimensional over two-dimensional sets was significant (x2 = 9.35, p < .005), due to children’s preference for three-dimensional sets in Task 7 (x2 = 10.94, p < .OOl). The responses to the iterative more task, not included in the statistical tests, were examined as indicators of the child’s knowledge that more is iterative. Children’s responses were categorized according to the number of sets they chose: 0, 1, 2 to 4, 5, or more than 5 sets. (Except in two cases, at age 26, children’s choices of 1, 2, 3, or 4 sets were always choices of sets with amounts greater than that of the standard of comparison. Choices of 5 sets always consisted of the 4 that had more than the standard of comparison plus the set that had the same amount as the standard.) At 23 and 3 years of age, children chose 0, 1, or more than 5 sets in this task. None of them chose 2 to 4 sets, more appropriate responses. At 34, however, six out of the eight subjects responded by choosing 2 to 4 sets, and responses of 2 to 4 sets remained quite high through 5; years of age (70.0% of 3& to 5&-year-olds). (At these ages 52.5% of the children chose all and only the four sets with greater amounts.) These general results of Experiment 1 suggest (1) that children learn more in relation to countable amounts before they do so with uncountable amounts and (2) that children’s correct understanding of instructions involving more in appropriate contexts shows the greatest increase between the ages of 3 and 34 and is extended to instructions with more applied to inappropriate contexts (i.e., single sets and equivalent amounts contexts) by the age of 4;. The generally lower performance on mass than count held in all four classes of tasks. In the equivalent amounts, differing amounts, and iterative more tasks, some of this might be attributable to the comparative difficulty of assessing relative mass amounts over assessing relative count amounts. Indeed, in the equivalent amounts tasks, most of the 5- and 5&-year-olds who erred carefully “weighed” or “measured” the mass stimuli before incorrectly deciding that one had more than the other. And in the iterative more task, all 5 children who included the equivalent set in their choices of sets that had more than the standard of comparison were in the mass condition. However, in the single set tasks, this could not have been a factor. The fact that the children performed more poorly on mass than on count even in Tasks 1 to 3 indicates that more than simple difficulties in assessing relative mass amounts is responsible for this result. The priority of application of more to relative count amounts is further supported by persistent attempts of children in the mass condition to respond in Task 12 (in which greater

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overall mass interacted negatively with greater number) according to number. Only 12 out of the 28 children (42.9%) in the mass condition responded correctly in the 12th task; 11 (39.3%) of the others (40% of those 36 and older) chose the set with the greater number of items. (The remaining 5 gave no response or ambiguous responses, switching from one set to the other.) There was little parallel tendency for the children in the count condition toward erring in favor of greater overall mass in Task 12. (Twenty-one of the 28 subjects in the count condition (75%) responded correctly; 5 (17.9%) (but only 5% of those 34 and older) responded in favor of mass.) These data suggest that the children who are at an intermediate stage of understanding of more are those between 3 and 46 years of age. Between 3 and 34 the children learn to respond correctly to more in appropriate contexts, and between 34 and 46 the children learn to respond correctly to more in the inappropriate single set and equivalent amounts contexts. Thus, the responses of the children between these ages (i.e., the 3-, 3+-, and 4-year-olds) were deemed the most important for determining the nature of children’s early semantic entries for more. On examining the response patterns of the twenty-four 3- to 4-yearolds, only 3 children’s (aged 3;3, 3;4, and 4;5) responses could be taken as support for any of the semantic feature hypotheses outlined above. Their responses in Tasks 1 to 18 are consistent with the first hypothesis, that more means [ + Amount]. Two of these children, however, gave evidence of understanding that more does not mean “some.” One of them (4;5) sometimes carefully lifted the stimuli to “weigh” them and occasionally explained her choices with “This one’s the heaviest” and “It’s the bigger one.” In addition, both she and the other child (3;4) had responses in the iterative more task that were inconsistent with the hypothesis that more meant “some” for them. The first had nearly correct responses; the other responded that none of the sets had “more.” Thus, the data of Experiment 1 offer only minimal support for any of the possible semantic featural representations outlined above. The responses of at best 3 children out of 24, and, more conservatively, of only 1 child, offer support for the hypothesis that more means [ + Amount]. (It is interesting that the data that are needed to support this hypothesis could also be used to support the theoretically less attractive hypothesis that before children know comparative more they bypass this word in comprehension tasks and respond on the basis of the rest of the sentence. Indeed, a protocol of some of the youngest children of pointing to a single object in a set suggests that they may have been following this strategy.) The data here are better explained according to one of the alternative hypotheses discussed above. Although it is difficult to rule out either the haphazard examples hypothesis or the prototype hypothesis for more on the basis of these data,

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they appear to favor the latter. In the context of the present study, the haphazard examples hypothesis would suggest that if a given child chooses a set according to fullness in one task, he or she has stored a haphazard example for more in which more applies to fullness; if the same child chooses according to heterogeneity in another task, he or she has stored a haphazard example that allows more to apply to heterogeneity; and if the child chooses according to amount in another, he or she has stored an example in which more applies to greater amount. If these examples are truly haphazard, the various uses of more should carry equal weights in that child’s representation of more. When faced with contexts in which the examples would lead to applying more to distinct referents, the child should become confused, or at least respond randomly. The accuracy of children’s responses in the differing amounts tasks indicates that this type of confusion did not occur. Of the 24 children between 3 and 4$ years old. 14 had responses in the equivalent amounts tasks that, under the haphazard examples hypothesis, would indicate that they had stored a haphazard example in which more applied to heterogeneity or fullness. At the same time, most of these children (12) had generally correct (87.5%) responses in the differing amounts tasks, which would indicate they had stored haphazard examples in which more applied to greater amount. Out of these 12 children, only one child (aged 3;4) had difficulty in responding to the differing amounts task in which heterogeneity or fullness interacted negatively with greater amount. The other 11 children had no difficulty in choosing according to greater amount in the differing amounts tasks, even though it meant overriding heterogeneity and fullness in some of those tasks. (The remaining 2 children who favored heterogeneity or fullness in the equivalent sets tasks performed poorly on the differing amounts tasks (20 and 40% accuracy). Both of these children had responses in the differing amounts tasks that conflicted with any possible bias favoring heterogeneity or fullness.) The priority of the application of more to greater amount evidenced in children’s responses to the differing amounts tasks seems to support, instead, the prototype hypothesis. If viewed in terms of the prototype hypothesis, the data fall much more neatly into place. First, all but one child among the 3&- and 4-year-olds had perfect or nearly-perfect scores in the differing amounts tasks (four children missed one item, one missed two items), and yet only four of these children had perfect or nearly perfect scores in the single set and equivalent amounts tasks (two children had perfect scores, one had one error, and the fourth had two errors). This can be explained if children learn more in relation to a prototype that embodies several semantic characteristics-among them, reference to amount, reference to a great amount, and reference to a difference in amount. When given the opportunity to respond to questions with more in contexts in which all the characteristics of the prototype apply,

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a child should have little difficulty, similar to the subjects in this study in the differing amounts tasks. But when asked questions with more in inappropriate contexts, a child might respond according to whether one or more of the semantic components of the prototype is present. This would lead to errors similar to those found here for the single sets and equivalent amounts tasks, in which it variously appears that the child thinks more means “some,” “a lot,” and so forth. This prototype account is supported in these data by the fact that the children had the least difficulty in responding correctly (i.e., responding in the negative to questions with “more X”) in those single set and equivalent amounts contexts that shared few characteristics with the appropriate use of more. The children had the least difficulty with Tasks 1 and 2. Task 1 shared nothing with a correct use of more; Task 2 shared with it only application to an amount. The task that appeared next easiest was Task 4, which shared only application to one of two amounts ([ +Amount, +Relational]) with the correct use of more. The other five single sets and equivalent amounts tasks appeared about equal in difficulty. Task 3 (which was significantly more difficult than Task 2 (X’ = 10.67, p < .005)) shared application to a great amount ([ + Amount, + Polar]) with the correct use of more; Tasks 5 to 8 shared reference to one of two amounts that showed positive polarity along some dimension ([ + Amount, + Polar, + Relational]). In the light of the fact that children can respond to instructions on the basis of nonlinguistic information and biases (Klatzky, Clark, & Macken, 1973; Wilcox & Palermo, 1982), one might argue that the patterns of responses observed may reflect not the nature of the child’s linguistic knowledge about more, but, rather, his use of nonlinguistic response strategies to deal with the stimuli of Experiment 1. One possibility is that children may have performed better on the differing amounts tasks than on the other two types of tasks simply because of a nonlinguistic response bias that favored greater amounts. If this were the case, the children should have done better on Task 10, in which the difference in amounts was great, than on Task 9, in which the amount differences were much smaller; the greater amount in Task 10 would have been much more salient. However, as we have seen, there was no significant difference in children’s responses to Tasks 9 and IO-not at 3+ and 4 years of age, nor at any other age. In addition, a response bias in favor of amounts could not explain the fact that these children’s responses in the iterative more task were not restricted to the greatest amount(s). Indeed, at 3; and 4, when responses to the differing amounts tasks were good, children’s responses changed from the immature responses at 2f and 3 of either choosing only one set, no set, or more than five sets, toward the more appropriate responses of two to four correct sets. A second possibility is that children may simply have had difficulty

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coping with the instructions involving the application of more in inappropriate contexts, thus leading them to perform more poorly on the single set and equivalent amounts tasks than on the differing amounts tasks. The more similar the context was to appropriate contexts for more, the more difficult the task might have become for the child. This could lead to patterns of responses like those observed above. Although it is difficult to rule out this possibility completely, several aspects of the data argue against it. To explore the possibility that children’s patterns of responses on the single set and the equivalent amounts tasks was due to coping strategies, rather than to the complexive application of a word whose meaning is stored with a prototype, the responses of the 3t- and 4-year-olds in these contexts were reexamined. In the equivalent amounts tasks, the responses of the children in the count condition are more instructive than those of the children who were assigned to the mass condition, since the latter may simply have had difficulty evaluating the relative sizes of the amounts presented to them. Out of the eight 3& and 4-year-olds in the count condition, four performed poorly on the equivalent amounts tasks, giving two or fewer correct responses out of five. The responses of one of these children appeared to be consistent with the suggestion that errors may have stemmed from difficulties of coping with these tasks. In the twovs three-dimensional task, he replied, “I can’t figure out”; in another task, he simply did not respond. The other three children, however, showed responses that suggest that more than mere coping was operating in their responses. One of these three children treated the same and more as compatible words. He emphatically stated for several of the equivalent sets tasks both that “they’re both the same” and that either one of them or both had “‘more.” That is, he appeared to know that the stimuli were the same, but this did not preclude his application of more to these stimuli. The remaining two children generally stated that both of the equivalent amounts sets had “more X,” one of them in all of the tasks, the other in three of the four tasks involving sets with three or more members. In fact, in the responses of all eight of the 38- and 4year-olds in the count condition, the prevalence of “both” choices contrasts sharply with their low occurrence in the errors of the younger children. It is of note that “both” choices constituted 61.1% of the errors made by the 3&- and 4-year-olds in the count condition on the equivalent amounts tasks, but only 17.1% of the errors made by the 2&- and 3-year-olds in the same condition. If the 3& and 4-year-olds were merely coping with a difficult task, one would expect a greater balance in the types of choices made, and more consistency with the types of errors exemplified by subjects in the younger age groups. In addition, the plausibility that this response type arose from a coping strategy lessens in the light of similar responses to one of the items tested

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in Experiment 2. Looking forward a bit, in one of the tasks of that experiment, children had to judge which of two sets of bows had “more bows.” One set contained three bows, the other four; this contrasted with all other tasks of Experiment 2, in which sets of only one or two items were contrasted with larger sets. In response to the bow task, seven of the sixteen 33- and 4-year-olds responded that both sets had there were no other “both” responses to “more bows. ” Interestingly, the stimuli of Experiment 2 by children in these age groups. In addition, few children in the other age groups responded that “both” sets of bows had “more” (one at 29 years of age, one at 3 years of age, and one at 4& years of age), although they did occasionally respond with “both” for other tasks. The similarity of this response pattern, produced by 3& and 4-year-olds in a context in which more was applied appropriately, to those found for the equivalent sets tasks indicates that the children are responding on the basis of more than a mere coping strategy in the two contexts. In fact, these response patterns, together with subjects’ difficulty with Task 3, recall the suggestion that more might mean “a lot” or “more than two” for some children at these ages. That is, these errors all exemplify the children’s acceptance of more in contexts in which three or more exemplars of an item were present. However, we have already seen that not one child’s pattern of responses in Experiment 1 is consistent with the hypothesis that more means [ +Amount, + Polar]. Further evidence against this possibility for the particular children discussed above comes from their responses to the iterative more task. The children who responded that both sets in the equivalent amounts tasks had “more X,” as well as the other four 39- and 4-year-olds in the count condition who responded that the single set of Task 3 had “more X,” all gave appropriate responses to the iterative more task. Most importantly, they did not state that the set of items that had the same number as the standard of comparison had “more X,” even though it had three items. The data again appear to be more compatible with the prototype theory. The willingness of 3J- and 4-year-olds to apply more to sets with many members, in Task 3, in Tasks 5 and 8, and in the bows task of Experiment 2, seems to have its source in knowledge about the meaning of more stored with a prototype. The children’s responses appear to indicate recognition that one of the major elements of meaning has to do with numerosity, but this is only one characteristic of the prototype. It is not the meaning of more. Thus, the data of Experiment 1 are more compatible with the prototype hypothesis than with either the haphazard examples hypothesis or the semantic features hypotheses. That is, the data are most consistent with the hypothesis that children first learn comparative more with a prototype and that they use it in contexts in which one or more features of the

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prototype apply. This leads the child to use more correctly in appropriate contexts but also at times inappropriately in inappropriate contexts. EXPERIMENT

2

The acquisition of more involves learning more than the fact that it means “greater in amount.” One additional linguistic characteristic of more that must be learned is its relationship with much and muny, or its dual-purpose role of specifying relative mass and relative count amounts. Experiment 2 addressed the question of when the child learns that more sometimes refers to a greater mass and sometimes to a greater number of items. “Greater in amount” more acts as the mutual comparative form for much and many. Much and many are both positive-pole quantifiers. They differ, however, in that, in general, many is used as a quantifier of, or nouns, such as blocks, while much is used pro-form for, “countable” as a quantifier of or pro-form for “mass” nouns, such as ulood. Thus, sentences like those in 1 require many, and those in 2 require much. 1. What will your child do with this many blocks? How many people were there at the game? 2. I need this much wood to finish the project. How much cheese did you sell? With both types of nouns, the comparative 3 and 4. 3. 4.

form is more, as shown in

What will your child do with more blocks? Were there more people at the game than last time? I need more wood to finish the project. He sold more cheese today than yesterday.

There is nothing in the surface form of more to distinguish its use as a count quantifier from its use as a mass quantifier. An adultlike command of the mass-count distinction underlying the superficially neutral more involves knowing at least two separate things. First, it entails knowing that some nouns refer to individual items and others refer to substances, and knowing which category given nouns belong to. Data in Gordon (1982) suggest that children correctly use mass and count nouns productively at an early age, but that perhaps children do not classify nouns into groups until around 4;9. (See Gathercole, in press, for discussion.) Secondly, the recognition that there is a count-mass distinction underlying more entails knowing that the count-mass distinction for nouns is relevant to this quantifier that modifies them. The data of Experiment 1 suggest that children learn count more before mass more, but that both uses are

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learned quite early. Yet, Experiment 1 did not require children to differentiate mass more from count more. As long as they knew that more refers to the greater of two amounts, they could perform well. In addition, there is evidence that children do not differentiate the mass quantifier much from the count quantifier many until an advanced age (Gathercole, 1979, 1985a). Because much and many are superficially distinct, while more is superficially neutral, one might expect the child to have even more difficulty in identifying the mass and count uses of more than of much and many. To determine the point at which children distinguish the mass and count uses of more, Experiment 2 was conducted. In it, children were forced to choose between mass and count interpretations of more X, where X was sometimes a mass noun and sometimes a count noun. Method Materials

Fourteen pairs of sets of materials were prepared. Seven of the pairs contained objects that are referred to with mass nouns; seven contained objects that are named by count nouns. The mass nouns used were chalk, ribbon, paper, candy, soap, cheese, and wax. The count nouns were pencils, bows, envelopes, noodles, bars of soap, feet, and deer, One criterion used in choosing these nouns was that there be some degree of similarity between the objects named by the mass and count nouns. Thus, chalk and pencils are both used for writing, candy and noodles are both foods, and so forth. (For one of these pairs, that of soap and burs of soap, the same stimuli could be used.) Another criterion used in choosing these nouns was the child’s probable familiarity with them and their referents. It was assumed that children between 2;6 and 6;0 would be familiar with most, if not all, of these items. In addition to these criteria, four of the nouns were chosen because of their phonological shapes. The mass-count distinction is often linguistically tied to a singular-plural contrast. In particular, in more X and some X, the mass-count status of X correlates directly with the number of the noun X: if X is a mass noun, it will occur in the singular in these phrases; if it is a count noun, it will occur in the plural. The inclusion of nouns whose number is phonologically opaque could help determine whether any child was using the phonological endings of the nouns as a cue for responding in favor of greater mass or greater number. Cheese (/Eiz/) and wax (/weeks/) are potentially interpretable as plural nouns, and feet and deer are potentially interpretable as singular nouns. In the pair of sets of stimuli for each noun, one set always had a greater number of objects than the other; the second set always had a greater overall mass. This would force the child in each case to decide,

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on the basis of linguistic information alone, whether more X referred to greater mass or greater number. The exact number of objects used in each case depended on the sizes of the exemplars. The overriding consideration was that the overall mass of the set with the smaller number of items be clearly greater than that of the set with the larger number of items. In most cases, one set contained two items and the other five. The exceptions to this were the sets with soap, pencils, and deer (2 vs 4), bows (3 vs 4), envelopes (2 vs 3), and ribbon (1 roll vs 2 roils). Procedure

Subjects were shown the two sets of objects for each noun on two separate sheets of white paper (8 x 11 in. (20.3 x 28 cm)). To ensure that the child identified the type of stimulus for each task with the target noun, the child was asked “Do you know what this is?” as the first object for that task was being set in place. (Care was taken to consistently use the singular form (“this”) in this question, since both mass and count nouns can occur in the singular.) If a child did not produce the target noun himself, he was told, “X, right ?” After all the items for a given noun had been set in place, the child was asked, “Which piece of paper has more X.7” For mass nouns, the correct response was the set with the greater mass, for count nouns, the set with the greater number of items. Four randomized orders of presentation were used and were balanced across age groups. In two of these orders, the first trial contained a count noun; in the other two, a mass noun. To check that adult uses coincide with the authors’ intuitions, two college classes were administered Experiment 2. A total of 19 monolingual or English-dominant bilingual students took part in the test. These subjects performed as expected in 93.6% of their responses (91.5% for items with mass nouns, 95.8% for items with count items). Results and Discussion The subjects were correct in 51.3% of their responses. Analyses of variance revealed that the overall accuracy across age groups did not differ significantly, ranging from a low of 41.1% at 24 to a high of 58% at 5 and 54. However, there was a significant difference in performance on mass and count nouns (F(l) 49) = 16.75, p < JOI), with 34.4% accuracy on the mass nouns and 68.1% accuracy on the count nouns. In addition, there was a significant interaction of mass vs count x age (F(6, 49) = 2.99, p < .025). The accuracy of the responses at each age for mass and count trials is shown in Table 3. Simple effects analysis revealed that there was no significant difference in performance on mass across age groups, but that there was a significant difference between groups on count. Newman-Keuls’ multiple range test revealed significant

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CORRECT RESPONSES TO MASS VERSUS COUNT

IN EXPERIMENT

2

Group

Mass

Count

Total

24

50.0

3 34 4 41 5 54

53.6 26.8 37.5 33.9 17.9 21.4 34.4

32.1 44.6 76.8 66.1 64.3 98.2 94.6 68.1

41.1 49.1 51.8 51.8 49.1 58.1 58.0 51.3

Total

differences in performance on count nouns between the two youngest and two oldest groups of children, as shown in Table 4. In addition, simple effects analysis revealed that children performed better on count over mass at 34 (F(1, 14) = 8.30, p < .025), 5 (F(1, 14) = 46.23, p < .OOl), and 5& (F( 1, 14) = 30.75, p < -001). Finally, there was no significant difference in performance on individual trials, indicating that the type of noun and the individual nouns used did not generally affect responses. These results of Experiment 2 place the acquisition of the two uses of more at vastly different ages from those suggested by Experiment 1, but they substantially support the evidence in Experiment 1 that children perform better on more when it relates to count nouns or countable quantities than when it relates to mass nouns or mass amounts. The discrepancy in the ages at which the children performed well in Experiments 1 and 2 seems to lie in the difference in the demands placed on the child’s linguistic understanding of more X in the two tests. As noted above, in order to perform well in Experiment 1, the child did not need to know that more X sometimes refers to relative masses and TABLE RESULTS OF NEWMAN-KEULS’

24

2: 3 4t 4 3s 54

4

MULTIPLE RANGE TEST, COMPARISONS COUNT NOUNS BY AGE GROUPS”

OF PERFORMANCE

ON -

3

41

4

34

54

.87

2.25 1.37

2.37 1.50 .I3

3.12 2.25 .88 .75

4.37* 3.50* 2.12 2.00 1.25

5 4.62* 3.75s 2.37 2.25 1.50 .25

’ C.diff, = 2.32; C.diff, = 2.79; C.diff, = 3.08; C.diff, = 3.28; C.diff, = 3.43; C.diff, = 3.56. * P < .05.

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sometimes to relative numbers. In Experiment 2, in contrast, the child’s knowledge that more X has the dual function of referring sometimes to relative mass and sometimes to greater number was critical for responding correctly. Experiment 2 indicates that this linguistic understanding does not develop until quite some time after the child has been able to use more appropriately in unambiguous contexts. The better performance on count more in both experiments is deserving of closer scrutiny. Did the stimuli in the two experiments simply foster a count interpretation of more? Although this possibility is somewhat plausible for Experiment 2, it is unlikely for Experiment 1. In the mass condition of Experiment 1, each set (except for Tasks 11 and 12) consisted not of a group of individual items, as in Experiment 2, but of a single, continuous mass. In Experiment 2 there is a greater possibility that the type of stimuli used encouraged the children to interpret more as referring to relative numbers of items. One might argue, first, that the linguistic stimuli favored count interpretations of more X. Since count nouns occur in the plural in this construction, children may have taken advantage of this marker in deciding on the meaning of more X and developed a strategy of responding on the basis of the plural marker as a clue to the meaning of more X. Children’s responses to the cheese, wax, feet, and deer stimuli, however, provide evidence that this was not the case. Rather than performing more poorly on these nouns whose plural status is phonologically opaque, as this possibility would suggest, subjects performed marginally better on these than on the other mass and count items. (The children showed an average of 2.86 correct responses at each age to cheese and wax, compared with 2.71 for the other mass items, and an average of 5.86 correct on feet and deer, compared with 5.29 on the other count nouns.) A second factor that might have led children to favor a count interpretation of more X in Experiment 2 is that several individual, countable items were presented in all but one stimulus set. The child could have taken the countability of the referents in Experiment 2 as an indication that more X referred to relative number. Despite this possibility, there are hints in the data for Experiment 2 that the better performance on more for count truly reflects how the child’s interpretation of more develops. The children’s responses to more in Experiment 2 did not favor count responses at all ages but, rather, appeared to show a progression that peaked in favor of the count interpretation just prior to completely correct responses to more. When individual children’s patterns of responses are examined, it is found that at 24 and 3, the children’s responses were generally inconsistent, favoring neither the mass nor the count interpretation of more X. (The slightly better performance on mass at these ages appears to be related to an attention to the bigger stimuli. Several children at

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these ages pointed to or lifted a single object in the greater-mass set in their responses, as opposed to older children’s pointing to the whole set or the paper on which the whole set was located.) From 3; to 4$, the children’s responses were more consistent, favoring either responses of greater mass (25% of subjects) or responses of greater number (54% of subjects), with a preference for the latter. But at 5 and 56, the children who still did not yet respond in an adultlike fashion insisted on interpreting more X exclusively as referring to relative number. The only other response type at these ages was an adultlike pattern of responses (25% of subjects). The fact that the preference for applying more X to relative numbers increased with age and peaked at a point just prior to the correct, differentiated use of more X suggests that the better performance on count more X over mass more X in Experiment 2 reflects an important aspect of the development of more X and is not merely due to interference from characteristics of the stimuli. EXPERIMENT

3

Experiment 3 investigated the acquisition of more as a comparative marker on adjectives and its development relative to the suffix -er. Data presented in Gathercole (1979) indicate that, in their spontaneous speech, children use more as an adjective modifier much later than they use -er to mark adjectives. -er is used productively by around 3;6, but more is not often used with adjectives until, around 4;6. the child begins to use it frequently as a double marking on compared adjectives, primarily adjectives of the type that normally take -er. A few examples are given in 5. 5. Rachel Rachel Saasha

Brian

4;8 4;lO 5;8

6;6

That chair’s more funner than any other chair. The kid’s much more older than the baby. You can taste it /b/-more better if you’d hold your nose. [S has just held her nose and tried a spoonful of soup.] . . . you can mostly hear us, ‘cause we’re more closer . . . than them.

What do these facts about children’s production indicate about their knowledge of comparative more ? There are at least two possibilities. First, the late appearance of comparative marker more in production and its association with -er may be a true indication of the child’s linguistic knowledge. That is, it is possible that the younger child simply has not yet learned that more can be used as an adjective marker and does not gain this understanding until he or she begins to use more as a second marker on adjectives already marked by -er. On the other hand, it is possible that the younger child has learned this function of more, but

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simply has not had many opportunities to use it, given that adjectives that typically take more are probably infrequent in his speech. Adjectives that take more are longer than those that take -er, and frequency counts of words in English (e.g., KuCera & Francis, 1967) show that, at least in adult usage, adjectives that take more are less frequent than those that take -er. Thus, it is possible that young children know that more can modify adjectives, but until they associate more with -er and begin to use it as a second marker on more frequent adjectives that normally take -er, they simply do not have occasion to use more as an adjective marker. Experiment 3 was conducted to obtain experimental evidence on whether young children are able to produce comparatives marked by more if they are provided with adjectives that normally take more. According to the first possibility above, young children should not be able to produce more A constructions in such a setting until some time after they have gained a good command of the A-er construction. According to the second possibility, however, young children should be quite successful in producing more A constructions in such experimental contexts. Method Stimuli were prepared to elicit children’s production of the comparative forms of 12 adjectives (4 monosyllabic, 4 disyllabic, and 4 polysyllabic). The 12 adjectives were big, fast, high, long, ugly, happy, little, handsome, interesting, dijjkult, dangerous, and unhappy. These adjectives were chosen because of their probable use in adult speech to children and because of their picturability. In a pretest on adults, it was determined that adults consistently use -er with the first 7 adjectives (“ER adjectives”) and more with interesting, d#icult, and dangerous (“MORE adjectives”). Adults vary, however, in their choice of -er and more as the comparative marker on handsome and unhappy (“EITHER adjectives”). Materials

Materials were devised for the 12 test adjectives and for 3 model adjectives (1 each of one, two, and three syllables), fat, funny, and delicious. For each adjective, two pictures were drawn or pasted on two 8 x 11-in. (20.3 x 28-cm) sheets of paper. In each pair, the two pictures depicted objects that differed along the relevant property. Procedure

At the beginning of the session, show you some pictures, and you about those pictures. This is how was then shown each of the pairs With each set, the child was told,

the subject was told, “I am going to and I are going to say some things we are going to do it.” The subject of pictures for the model adjectives. “Do you see these two pigs (men,

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pictures of food)? If I say, ‘This pig is fat’ (man . . . funny, food . . . delicious) (experimenter pointing to one picture), I want you to say ‘This pig is fatter’ (man . . . funnier, food . . . more delicious) (experimenter pointing to other picture). Can you say that?” If the child did not spontaneously repeat the comparative models, he was asked after each one to do so with “Let’s hear you say that.” After the models, the test items were presented in a similar fashion. For each pair of pictures, the child was expected to complete the sentence .” If the child did “This X is Y, and this X/Z is not use some form of the comparative on the first trial, the prompt was repeated. If on the second trial the child still did not produce some form of the comparative, he or she was given thefunny model again, and then the test item was repeated a third time. If the child still did not produce a comparative form of the adjective, he or she was given the correct response. The repeated trials were given for each adjective to ensure that children were given ample opportunities to use the comparative for that adjective if they were able to do so. (See below, however, for evidence that the funny prompts did not appreciably affect children’s performance.) The comparative form was given in those cases in which children failed to do so in the hope that if their failure to respond was due to not having grasped the nature of the task, this information would facilitate their grasping this. The test items were presented in random order. Results and Discussion The total number of adjectives marked for the comparative in some way was 69.2%. The ER adjectives were marked 75% of the time, MORE adjectives 60.7% of the time, and EITHER adjectives 61.6% of the time. Analysis of variance of the correct markings on ER and MORE adjectives revealed a significant main effect of age (F(6, 49) = 9.40, p < .OOl), with performance improving dramatically from 23 to 34 and from there gradually increasing, with only a slight decrease at 4;0, until reaching 78.8% overall accuracy at age 5&. There was also a significant difference in the production of the correct comparative forms of ER and MORE adjective types (F( 1,49) = 36.32, p < .OOl), with the children performing better overall on ER adjectives than on MORE adjectives (67.3% vs 28.6% correct, respectively). There was not a significant two-way interaction between age and correct production of adjective type, however. Children’s markings of the three types of adjectives are summarized in Table 5. These results reveal, first, that in this experimental setting, as in spontaneous speech, children become quite adept at producing comparatives marked with -er by the age of 33. The correct marking of ER adjectives reaches 70.5% at 34 and 4 years of age (78.6% at 36) and remains high for the older children. The dramatic improvement in the correct use of

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MARKINGS

ON

ER, MORE,

AND

C. GATHERCOLE TABLE 5 EITHER

ADJECTIVES

IN EXPERIMENT

3

Markings ER adjectives Group

-er

23-3 36-4 4$-5 sg Total

27.1 70.5 87.5 100.0 67.3

more

3.6 3.6 5.4 0.0 3.6

EITHER adjectives

MORE adjectives -cr 2.1 35.4 31.3 50.0 26.8

more

14.6 29.2 41.7 29.2 28.6

-er

6.3 40.6 50.0 75.0 38.4

more

9.4 12.5 21.9 18.8 15.2

Note. Data are percentages calculated on the basis of the number of adjectives of type X marked with marker Y, divided by the total number of trials with adjective type X.

-er on ER adjectives at 36 and 4 is paralleled by substantial increases in the use of -er on MORE and EITHER adjectives at the same ages. The results of this study reveal also that, in contrast to this very extensive use of -er by the age of 34 in this experimental setting, the children are not successful in producing comparatives marked by more until much later, with the most success occurring at 4; to 5 years of age. The correct production of MORE adjectives with more is generally quite low except in the case of the 5-year-olds (54.2%). In addition, unlike the frequent incorrect use of -er on MORE adjectives by children aged 3& and older, the incorrect use of more on ER adjectives is consistently low. Similarly, the use of more as a marker on EITHER adjectives remains relatively low, although it generally increases across ages (reaching a high of 43.8% at age 5). One final outcome of the study was a very low incidence of double marking on these adjectival stimuli. The total number of doubly marked adjectives was 4.7% of all adjectives marked in some way. It might be argued that the children favored -er over more in their responses because of aspects of the experimental procedure. In particular, in those cases in which children had difficulty responding to adjectives, the funny model was repeated as a prompt. Since funny takes -er, this could have artificially boosted the use of -er by the subjects of this study. To investigate this possibility, the performance of children who received the funny prompt was examined. Their responses provide evidence against this possibility. First, funny prompts did not generally facilitate peformance on the adjective being tested. Only 11 of the 157 (7.0%) responses following funny prompts involved the comparative or a related construction. (These included 9 uses of -er, 1 of more, and 1 of -est.) The remaining responses

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consisted of (1) the iteration of responses given prior to the funny model (63/157, or 40.1%), (2) refusals to respond (e.g., “I don’t know,” “too hard,” and the like) (48/157, or 30.6%), (3) the use offunny or funnier (24/157, or 15.3%), (4) the use of an unmarked adjective (“X”) (9/157, or 5.7%), or (5) the imitation of the stimulus (2/157, or 1.3%). Thus, the results reported above and in the tables consist primarily of responses given without the aid offunny prompts. Second, in the 10 cases in which responses following thefunny prompt involved the comparative, children generally used the correct marker with the adjective being tested. Six involved the use of -er on ER adjectives, one more on a MORE adjective, two -er on EITHER adjectives, and one -er on “dangerer” in response to “dangerous.” (Perhaps the child interpreted “-0~s” as “-est.“) Third, there is little evidence that the eight children who produced these 10 comparative responses favored -er. Six of them used more in response to other adjectives, three of these in a trial immediately following one in which an -er comparative was produced after the funny model. The results of the experiment, thus, appear to support the position that more comes into use much later than -er as a productive adjective marker. These data suggest that perhaps more becomes productive around 44 to 5 years of age, which is quite consistent with the naturalistic data in Gathercole (1979). When more first appears to be used productively here with these adjectives, it is not used as a double marker. In fact, surprisingly few double markings were recorded in the data. This result suggests that more is not first introduced into adjectival constructions as a double marker on comparatives, but as a separate adjective marker that can be overextended in use to adjectives marked by -er. To compare these subjects’ experimental use of double marking with their spontaneous use of double marking, all comparatives produced in casual conversation by the children during the sessions for all three experiments were transcribed from the tapes. Among these comparatives, children doubly marked comparatives 18.2% of the time, much higher than the 4.7% use of double marking in Experiment 3. Close examination of these doubly marked adjectives reveals the following. First, except in two cases of double marking involving suppletive comparative forms (“worser” and “less older”), all spontaneous uses of double marking occurred with ER adjectives. This is not surprising, however, since 95.1% of all of the comparatives produced spontaneously were based on ER adjectives. Nevertheless, it should be noted that even in Experiment 3, most of the doubly marked adjectives (90.9%) were also based on ER and EITHER adjectives. This is disproportionately high, given that ER and EITHER adjectives constituted only 75% of the stimulus adjectives (and 78.1% of the adjectives marked for the comparative in the experiment). The preponderance of double marking on ER and EITHER adjectives over MORE adjectives

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suggests, perhaps, that when children learn that more is an adjective marker, they learn to use it with certain adjectives and then overextend its use to adjectives already marked by -er. A second characteristic of the spontaneous uses of double marking is that several children who doubly marked adjectives also produced singly marked versions of the same adjectives. The fact that these forms coincided in their speech, along with the fact that double marking was relatively rare in the experimental context, suggests that double marking is not likely to arise in contexts in which the form of the comparative is the focus of attention, as it was in the experiment, but, rather, in contexts in which the form of the comparative is subordinate to its message. It may be of note that in the experiment, children were presented with models of adjectives marked by -er and more, but never of doubly marked adjectives. Although the discussion above regarding the funny prompts suggests that modeling had little effect on children’s responses, it is possible that the lack of doubly marked models acted as a “reminder” to children who already knew something about the formation of comparatives that the use of either -er or more is sufficient. Thus, it appears that performance constraints, not only underlying linguistic ability, contribute to the child’s use of double marking of comparatives. GENERAL

DISCUSSION

From the results of Experiments I and 2, we can hypothesize four successive stages in the acquisition of the quantifier more, after the early use of more for recurrence: Stage 1. First, by around the age of 34, the child learns that more refers to the greater of two amounts. His semantic entry for more at this point does not consist of a set of semantic features, but most likely contains a prototypical more which embodies reference to an amount, reference to a great amount, reference to one of two comparable amounts, and so forth. At this stage, the child can respond appropriately to more in appropriate contexts, but he may respond inappropriately in an inappropriate context on the basis of characteristics it shares with the prototype. Stage 2. By about the age of 4;, the child’s understanding of more for “greater of two amounts” becomes stabilized, so that he no longer interprets more incorrectly in inappropriate contexts. During Stages 1 and 2, the child can use more appropriately for either mass quantities or count quantities, but its use is entirely dependent on the type of objects referred to. However, if the child is forced to choose between using more for greater mass or for greater number in tasks like those in Experiment 2, his responses, if consistent, will favor either of the two, indicating that a linguistic distinction has not yet been made between the two uses of more X.

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Stage 3. At Stage 3, beginning around Age 5, the child responds in contexts like those of Experiment 2 as if more means “greater in number.” There are three possible explanations for this development: A. Semantic hypothesis. More has come to mean exclusively “greater in countable amount.” If this is the case, the child would (1) later have to add to his mental lexicon “greater in mass amount” as a second meaning for more; (2) probably become confused in certain unambiguous and ambiguous contexts because of competition between this new onesided linguistic analysis of more and his well-worn uses of more for both greater number and greater overall mass; and (3) need a different linguistic expression to refer to greater overall mass. B. Pragmatic hypothesis. Alternatively, the child’s new insistence on applying more solely to greater number in contexts like those of Experiment 2 may arise from a new realization that more is used in two ways, depending on whether the referents can be counted or come in undifferentiated masses. The child may have discovered that if items can be counted, more refers to the relative number of items; if they do not come in countable units, more refers to the relative overall mass. Such a realization would lead him in contexts like those in Experiment 2 to treat more as if it means “greater in countable amount,” since the objects came in countable pieces. This hypothesis, unlike hypothesis A, would not predict confusion between the two uses of more in unambiguous contexts. In addition, this hypothesis would predict that the child would continue using more for both greater number and greater mass without resorting to some alternative linguistic form for referring to relative masses. C. Zncipient semantic hypothesis. Finally, the child may have come to realize that there is a distinction between types of amounts that has to do with countability, and that this distinction is relevant to uses of more X. However, the precise details of that distinction are not yet clear to the child. Because quantification of countable amounts is apparently more accessible to the child than that of continuous amounts (see, e.g., Brainerd [I9781 for a review of studies showing that conservation of number precedes conservation of other quantity), in tasks like those of this experiment children might favor the count interpretation of more X. This hypothesis, unlike the semantic hypothesis, does not entail asymmetric acquisition of count vs mass more X. However, like the semantic hypothesis, the incipient semantic hypothesis predicts potential confusion in the application of more X, especially in ambiguous contexts. In addition, as under the semantic hypothesis, one might find attempts on the child’s part, as he strives to uncover the details of the mass-count distinction, to differentiate the uses of more X linguistically, reserving one linguistic expression for count comparisons and another for mass comparisons. Stage 4. The child can now produce correct, adultlike responses to more in ambiguous contexts in which the count and mass uses of more

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would lead to different, contrasting responses. There are three explanations for this development, corresponding to the three hypotheses for Stage 3: A. Semantic hypothesis. The child has come to realize that more not only means “greater in count amount” but can also mean “greater in mass amount .” B. Pragmatic hypothesis. The child has come to realize that even in some cases where objects come “packaged” in units, the noun referring to those objects (and/or more) refers to the mass or material of which that object is made, not to the individual unit. C. (Post-) incipient semantic hypothesis. The child has worked out the details of the count and mass uses of more X. This development is presumably dependent on learning the count and mass status of individual nouns and how they interact with mass and count quantifiers like much and many. Although the data of Experiments 1 and 2 were not designed to test the three hypotheses of Stages 3 and 4, there are some indications that, of the three sets, the semantic or incipient semantic hypothesis may be the correct one. First, as predicted by the semantic and incipient semantic hypotheses, there are some signs of confusion about the application of more X in the children who appear to be at Stage 3. In Experiment 2, several children who generally showed consistent “greater number” responses got confused in one of the mass trials-e.g., suddenly turning with an astonished look and asking “What do you mean!” As predicted by the incipient semantic hypothesis, most children in these age groups did not have difficulty in responding to more X in the unambiguous contexts of Experiment 1. However, at least one child (4;8), who gave consistent count responses in Experiment 2, tried to force count interpretations for more X also in Experiment 1, even though she had been assigned to the mass condition, as the semantic hypothesis would predict. In addition, as predicted by these two hypotheses, the children do attempt to differentiate reference to greater number linguistically from reference to greater mass-by using more for the former and bigger or biggest for the latter. Subsequent to Experiment 2, several of the children were interviewed informally about their preferences for certain stimuli. Many were asked, in relation to the stimuli for candy, “If you could have the candy on this piece of paper or the candy on this piece of paper, which would you choose?” When they had chosen, they were asked why they had chosen as they did. In their explanations, children most often referred to the set with the greater overall muss with “bigger” but they referred to the set with the greater number of or “biggest,” candy bars most often with more. If the above account of the acquisition of more is correct. the progression

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for the development of the superficially ambiguous more appears in some respects similar to that hypothesized by Karmiloff-Smith (1977, 1979) for the development of similarly superficially ambiguous words. In particular, the child begins with an immature interpretation of more; he then passes through an intermediate stage during which he appears to experience some confusion, due to competition between a new interpretation of more and the original uses; and, finally, the child arrives at a stage at which the two uses of more are recognized and differentiated, and there is some evidence of attempts to overdifferentiate them. (A (5;O) contrasted “more clay” with “more pieces of clay,” J (5;l) “more candy” [count] with “more space of candy.“) The acquisition of comparative marker more can be placed at approximately the same time as, or perhaps just before, the child enters Stage 3. It is interesting to speculate on whether the child’s beginning understanding of the mass and count uses of more and the use of more as an adjective marker are related developments. On the surface, these linguistic characteristics of more appear totally unrelated. However, it may be that the arrival at Stage 2 allows the child to further explore this word, which now has a stable meaning, and its relationship with other words and morphemes such as -er, mcdch, and many. Indeed, syntactic advances that begin to take place at the same age-namely, the introduction of nominal elements into adjectival constructions and the attachment of two modifiers on a single adjectival or nominal headsuggest that the child has recognized relationships among previously unrelated forms and is moving toward bringing them together into a coherent system (see Gathercole, 1979). The progression in the acquisition of more that has been outlined here has implications for other child language studies. First, it raises some questions about the acquisition of less. Is there a period in the acquisition of less, similar to that hypothesized in Stage 1 for more, during which the child can respond appropriately to less in appropriate contexts but not in inappropriate contexts? Evidence bearing on this question would help test the hypothesis (Gordon, 1978) that less is learned from the beginning as the polar opposite of more, with all the attendant semantic and distributional properties (except polarity) associated with more. Interestingly, the age at which children move “with an insightful suddenness” from incorrect to correct use of less appears to be around 44, the age at which the children studied here have arrived at a stable meaning for more. Second, when does the child recognize the mass-count distinction between less and fewer, and how is this related to the child’s refinement of the meanings of comparative more in Stages 3 and 4? Three- and fouryear-olds’ willingness to use less in relation to both continuous and discontinuous stimuli (e.g., in Palermo, 1974) suggests that the distinction may develop quite late. Finally, when does the child begin using less as

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an adjective marker? Unlike more, less is not restricted in its application to adjectives. All adjectives, whether they are of the ER, MORE, or EITHER type, are marked by less in the formation of negative-pole comparatives. In addition to raising these questions about the acquisition of less, the present study provides evidence bearing on recent hypotheses regarding the acquisition of comparatives and the acquisition of relational words in general. First, Gitterman and Johnston (1983) recently suggested that children learn comparatives in relation to dynamic situations before they learn them in relation to static comparisons. This hypothesis is indirectly disputed here by the success of the children in Experiment 1, in which comparisons of the static type were tested. The subjects of this study were successful in responding to more in these conditions by the age of the youngest subjects in the Gitterman and Johnston study. In addition, the results of this study suggest that hypotheses about possible differences in the processes of acquiring relational and nonrelational words are too general and in need of further refinement. Gentner (1978) suggested that verbs and other relational terms are much more likely to be acquired component by component than nouns, or referential terms. We have seen in Experiment 1 that a component-by-component process of acquisition for the relational term more had to be rejected. REFERENCES Bartlett, E. J. (1976). Sizing things up: The acquisition of the meaning of dimensional adjectives. Journal of Child Language, 3, 205-219. Bloom, L. M. (1970). Language development: Form andfimction in emerging grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloom, L. M. (1973). One word at a time: The use of single word utterances before syntax. The Hague: Mouton. Bowerman, M. (1978). The acquisition of word meaning: An investigation of some current conflicts. In N. Waterson & C. Snow (Eds.), The development of communication: Social andpragmatic factors in language acquisition (pp. 263-287). New York: Wiley. Brainerd, C. J. (1978). Piaget’s theory of intelligence. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Brewer, W. F., L Stone, J. B. (1975). Acquisition of spatial antonym pairs. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 19, 299-307. Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Carey, S. (1978a). Less may never mean more. In R. N. Campbell & P. T. Smith (Eds.), Recent advances in the psychology of language: Language development and motherchild interaction (pp. 109-131). New York: Plenum. Carey. S. (1978b). The child as word learner. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. Miller (Eds.), Linguisiic rheory and psychological reality (pp. 269-293). Cambridge, MA: MIT Pess. Clark, E. V. (1973a). Non-linguistic strategies and the acquisition of word-meanings. Cognition. 2, 161482.

Clark, E. V. (1973b). What’s in a word? On the child’s acquisition of semantics in his first language. In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of /anguage (pp. 65-110). New York: Academic Press.

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Clark, E. V. (1975). Knowledge, context and strategy in the acquisition of meaning. In D. P. Dato (Ed.), Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics (pp. 77-98). Washington, DC: Georgetown Univ. Press. Clark, H. H. (1970). The primitive nature of children’s relational concepts. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 269-278). New York: Wiley. Donaldson, M., & McGarrigle, J. (1974). Some clues to the nature of semantic development. Journal of Child Language, 1, 185-194. Finch-Williams, A. (1981). Biggerest or biggester: A study. in children’s acquisition of linguistic

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Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kansas. Gathercole. V. C. (1979). Birdies like birdseed the bester than buns: A study of relational comparatives and their acquisition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kansas. Gathercole, V. C. (1983). Haphazard examples, prototype theory, and the acquisition of comparatives. First Language, 4, 169-196. Gathercole, V. C. (1985). “He has too much hard questions”: The acquisition of the linguistic mass-count distinction in much and many. Journal of Child Language, 12. Gathercole, V.C. (in press). Evaluating competing theories with child language data: The case of the mass-count distinction. Linguistics & Philosophy. Gentner, D. (1978). On relational meaning: The acquisition of verb meaning. Child Development,

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Gitterman. D., & Johnston, J. R. (1983). Talking about comparisons: A study of young children’s comparative adjective usage. Journal of Child Language, 10, 605-621. Gordon, P. (1978). Partial lexical entry and the semantic development of more and less. Unpublished manuscript, University of Stirling. Gordon, P. (1982). The acquisition of syntactic categories: The case of the count/mass distinction. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, MIT. Greenberg, J., & Kuczaj, S. (1982). Towards a theory of substantive word-meaning acquisition. In S. A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language development (pp. 275-311). Hillsdale. NJ: Erlbaum. Grieve, R., & Dow, L. (1981). Bases of young children’s judgments about more. Journal of Experimental

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Harasym, C. R., Boersma, F. J., & Maguire, T. 0. (1971). Semantic differential analysis of relational terms used in conservation. Child Development, 42, 761-779. Hudson, L. M., Guthrie, K. H., & Santilli, N. R. (1982). The use of linguistic and nonlinguistic strategies in kindergarteners’ interpretations of more and less. Journal of Child Language, 9, 125-138. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1977). More about the same: Children’s understanding of post-articles. Journal

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Karmiloff-Smith,

A. (1979). A functional approach to child language: A study of determiners and reference. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univ. Press. Kavanaugh, R. B. (1976). On the synonymity of more and less: Comments on a methodology. Child

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Klatzky, R. L., Clark, E. V., & Macken, M. (1973). Asymmetries in the acquisition of polar adjectives: Linguistic or conceptual? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 16, 32-46.

KuEera, H., & Francis, W. N. (1967). Computational analysis of present-day English. Providence, RI: Brown Univ. Press. Palermo, D. S. (1973). More about less: A study of language comprehension. Verbal

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Townsend, D. J. (1976). Do children interpret ‘marked’ comparative adjectives as their opposites? Journal of Child Language, 3, 385-396. Trehub, S. E., & Abramovitch, R. (1978). Less is not more: Further observations. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 25, 160-167. Wannemacher, J. T., & Ryan, M. L. (1978). “Less” is not “more”: A study of children’s comprehension of “less” in various task contexts. Child Development. 49, 660-668. Wilcox, S., & Palermo, D. S. (1982). Children’s use of lexical and nonlexical information in responding to commands. Journal of Child Language, 9, 139-150. Weiner, S. L. (1974). On the development of more and less. Journal ofExperimental Child Psychofogy, RECEIVED:

17, 271-287.

October

5,

1983; REVISED:

November 19. 1984.