Meaning matters in children’s plural productions

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 use of the plural in any way related to meaning. Experiment 1 elicited plural productions from 2-year olds (n=26) for sets of size two and four and for instances of basic level categories that were either similar or identical. Children were much more likely to produce the plural of these well known nouns when there were four rather than two and when the instances were identical rather than merely similar. Experiment 2 examined spontaneous productions of parents speech to two-year-olds (n = 16). They showed a comparable similarity effect, but not a number effect. The results provide new evidence on children’s acquisition of the English plural, showing that children’s early productions are not just limited by knowledge of the noun and its plural form but also is limited by properties of the labeled sets in ways that are relevant to the underlying meaning of the plural