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Abstract
Three experiments assessed the possibility, suggested by Quine (1960, 1969) among
others, that the ontology underlying natural language is induced in the course of
language learning, rather than constraining learning from the beginning. Specifically,
we assessed whether the ontological distinction between objects and non-solid substances
conditions projection of word meanings prior to the child's mastery of count/mass
syntax. Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted unfamiliar objects with unfamiliar substances
in a word-learning task. Two-year-old subjects' projection of the novel word to new
objects respected the shape and number of the original referent. In contrast, their
projection of new words for non-solid substances ignored shape and number. There were
no effects of the child's knowledge of count/mass syntax, nor of the syntactic context
in which the new word was presented. Experiment 3 revealed that children's natural
biases in the absence of naming do not lead to the same pattern of results. We argue
that these data militate against Quine's conjecture.