Early Sensitivity to Telicity: The Role of the Count/Mass Distinction in Event Individuation

Abstract

This paper presents evidence that English-speaking children are sensitive to telicity based on the count/mass distinction of the object noun in verb phrases such as eat an apple (telic) vs. eat ice cream (atelic). Previous work (Wagner and Carey 2003) has demonstrated that children use the presence/absence of the object in a verb phrase to recognize the end point of an event, though children continued to show a bias for a spatio-temporally defined individuation compared to adults. In the present experiment, telicity was specified by the count/mass distinction of the object noun. The results both replicated and extended the general findings of Wagner and Carey: children showed knowledge of telicity, but the spatio-temporal bias was still dominant in their event individuation. It is concluded that children’s sensitivity to telicity stems from sources ranging from syntactic to semantic.