Much research has demonstrated a shape bias in categorizing and naming solid objects. This research has shown that when an entity is conceptualized as an individual object, adults and children attend to the object's shape. Separate research in the domain of numerical cognition suggest that there are distinct processes for quantifying small and…

The English plural is about the "number" of "individuals" in a "set" of "like kinds." Two-year-old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from…

This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A[right arrow]AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A[right arrow]AB). The children in…

Young children's skilled generalization of newly learned nouns to new instances has become the battleground for two very different approaches to cognition. This debate is a proxy for a larger dispute in cognitive science and cognitive development: cognition as rule-like amodal propositions, on the one hand, or as embodied, modal, and dynamic…