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Children learn words of quantity like English ‘some’, ‘most’, and ‘all’ in the same order across different languages.

We can all imagine how 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. And yet recent research involving 50 academics from around the world, including Dr Peter Crosthwaite from the University of Hong Kong, has found that children speaking one of 31 different languages master these words in the same order. Their findings bring a new perspective into the debate on the universality of language and point to 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.

Dr Crosthwaite, who is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Applied English Studies, joined Dr Napoleon Katsos from the University of Cambridge and over 50 colleagues from around the world in the study, which was published in the August 16 issue of the highly prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Dr Crosthwaite was responsible for testing Koreans in the experimental phase, alongside other scholars also contributing to Cantonese and Mandarin data collection.

The study attempted to determine how children acquire other kinds of quantifier words, such as ‘some’, ‘all’, ‘most’, ‘none’, and ‘some are not’, for which there is no natural order. The study included 768 five-year-old children and 536 adults who spoke one of 31 languages 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.

For further details on the study, please visit: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9244.short

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