Ordinals are not as easy as one, two, three: The acquisition of cardinals and ordinals in Dutch

Abstract

<p>This study argues that the pattern and timing of ordinal acquisition differs substantially from that of cardinals and is influenced by different language-specific factors, such as (ir)regular ordinal morphology, superlative morphology, and the singular-plural distinction. We discuss data from a Give X task (Wynn 1992) administered to 77 Dutch monolinguals (2;11–6;04) that support a so-called knower-level acquisition pattern (e.g., Le Corre & Carey 2007) for Dutch cardinals but show a more complex picture for ordinals, which are acquired around the time a child masters the necessary counting principles and becomes a CP (cardinal principle) knower. Not only is the tiered pattern absent in regular low ordinals, we also see that it takes time for children to link <i>drie</i> ‘three’ to irregular <i>derde</i> ‘third.’ We take this as evidence that ordinals are acquired via rules, rather than being stored lexically one by one.</p