Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do learners acquire the meanings of nouns? Given the complex linguistic and non-linguistic input present in the learning environment, how do learners identify the concepts denoted by nouns? In other words, how does a learner map the input language to non-linguistic concepts? In the current study, we focus on the case of mass-count language and physical entities (e.g., objects and substances). We conduct novel word extension experiments to investigate whether conceptual and linguistic factors universally affect label extension to previously unseen entities in languages that do and do not have a grammatical mass-count distinction (Experiment 1: English; Experiment 2: Korean, respectively). We find that objecthood and linguistic (count/mass) context both modulate how speakers extend labels to structurally disrupted novel entities.