urn:uuid:4c3853f2-f723-786f-e106-d63277688982 RUcore Syndication System, v1.0 Copyright 2018, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3KD20XC Syrett, Kristen 2018-05-07T20:15:00-04:00

In this research, I investigate the onset of children’s recognition that certain predicates -- predicates that are frequent and/or familiar to young children -- obligatorily apply at the individual level. The findings demonstrate that this knowledge is nascent at least by 3 years of age, and that it applies to groups of individuals referred to not only by count nouns, which have overt plural morphology, but also by object mass nouns, which lack it. Thus, I argue that children are driven by their conceptualization of the mereology of groups, rather than surface morphosyntax, and are sensitive to the fact that the lexical semantic representations of predicates may also tap into this structure.