Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does cross-linguistic variation in grammatical structureaffect children’s acquisition of number words? In this study,we addressed this question by investigating the case study ofyoung speakers of French, a language in which the number oneand the indefinite article a are phonologically the same (i.e.,un). We tested how French-speaking children interpret un, andwhether it more closely resembles the English word a or one.We found that French-speaking children almost alwaysaccepted sets of 1 for un, but that their responses for sets of 2were more equivocal, with many children saying “Oui” (Yes)when asked whether there was un. Overall, French children’sinterpretation of un differed from how English-speakinginterpret both a and one. This suggests that French-speakingchildren’s interpretation of un reflects the ambiguity of theinput that they are exposed to. We conclude that Frenchmorphological structure may pose a challenge to French-speaking children in acquiring an exact numerical meaning forthe word un, potentially causing a delay in number wordlearning.