When children learn to count, they start with ‘one’ and proceed in order of increasing cardinality (“one, two, three…”). But what about other words of quantity such as ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘most’, or ‘none’?
No-one teaches young children explicitly what these words mean or how they are used, but an international study including academics from the University of Cyprus, found that children speaking one of 31 different languages master these words in the same order. This bring a new perspective into the debate on universality of language: we have now found universals in the process of how we learn language, as contrasted to universal properties of language itself. This research also opens the door to creating language assessment tests that are applicable to every language.
The new study discovered that children acquire words that denote quantity, such as the English ‘some’ and ‘all’, in a predictable order across many different languages. Previous research suggests that children learn number words in increasing numerical order, such as “one, two, three”.
Professor Kleanthes K. Grohmann from the University of Cyprus, and a former PhD student, joined Napoleon Katsos from the University of Cambridge and over 50 colleagues from around the world in a novel research study that was published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The majority of researchers collaborated in the European research network COST Action A33 “Cross-Linguistically Robust Stages of Children’s Linguistic Performance” (2006–2010).
Prof. Grohmann’s team was responsible for testing Greek Cypriot children and was supported from the University of Cyprus with funding for the Gen-CHILD Project (grant no. 8037-61017). This is the first time in the history of PNAS that empirically based reference is made in the journal to grammatical properties of Cypriot Greek and its developmental acquisition — and it finds some interesting differences from Standard Modern Greek based on data collected by colleagues in Greece.
The study included 768 five-year-old children and 536 adults who spoke one of 31 languages, including Cypriot Greek, representing 11 language groups. The authors showed participants five objects and five boxes with zero to five of the objects placed inside the boxes. Participants listened to sentences containing one of the quantifiers (e.g., “All of the objects are in the boxes.”) and judged whether the sentences correctly or incorrectly described the visual display. Children across languages acquired quantifiers in a similar order based on factors related to the words’ meanings and uses. For example, children more successfully understood quantifiers such as ‘all’ or ‘none’ than quantifiers such as ‘some’ and ‘most’, suggesting that children acquire words that encompass totality at an earlier stage of development than words that denote a portion of a group.
Reference:
N. Katsos, C. Cummins, M.-J. Ezeizabarrena, A. Gavarró, J. KuvaÄ Kraljević, G. Hrzica, K.K. Grohmann, et al.: 'Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), doi:10.1073/pnas.1601341113.
