The basis for acquisition of categories in child language was investigated. The early encoding of the distinction between mass and count nouns was examined to determine whether children categorize them on the basis of semantic type or syntactic regularities. An experiment was designed in which semantic and syntactic cues were in competition:…

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…