Cross-linguistic relations between quantifiers and numerals in language acquisition: Evidence from Japanese

Abstract

A study of 104 Japanese-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds tested the relation between numeral and quantifier acquisition. Experiment 1 assessed Japanese children’s comprehension of quantifiers, numerals, and classifiers. Relative to English-speaking counterparts, Japanese children were delayed in numeral comprehension at 2 years old, but showed no difference at 3 and 4. Also, Japanese 2-year-olds had better comprehension of quantifiers, indicating that their delay was specific to numerals. A second study examined the speech of Japanese and English caregivers, to explore the syntactic cues that might affect integer acquisition. In English, quantifiers and numerals occurred in similar syntactic positions, and overlapped to a greater degree than in Japanese. Also, Japanese nouns were often dropped, and both quantifiers and numerals exhibited variable positions relative to the nouns they modified. We conclude that syntactic cues in English facilitate bootstrapping numeral meanings from quantifier meanings, and that such cues are weaker in classifier languages like Japanese