Abstract
This study examines the effect of collective nouns in Welsh on children's processing. Welsh- and English-speaking children aged 4, 8 and 11 were tested in a categorization and a recognition task. Results show significant effects of number of objects and numbers of collections in displays, as well as of the syntax used in presenting novel words, on participants' categorization. The most robust finding was that Welsh-speaking participants took significantly longer to respond in the categorization task than their English-speaking counterparts, if the displays could be interpreted as either a number of individuals or a number of collections. We suggest that Welsh speakers took longer because they had to consider competing interpretations of stimuli, due to the dual possibilities of interpretation available in the Welsh language.
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