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 count/mass disinction is often considered to be a semantic one because it distinguishes those nouns that refer to countable things from those that refer to non-countable things. However, exceptions indicate that semantic properties alone are not sufficient to determine noun sub-categorization. Therefore, such sub-categorization must be defined…

Analyses of longitudinal speech data collected from two children indicated that children rapidly acquire count/mass noun distinctions. (Author/CB)