Cognitive effects of language differences

: collection categories in Welsh and English

Abstract

The ways in which collective nouns are acquired is poorly understood. The
research that has been carried out to date indicates that collective nouns are extremely difficult for children to acquire; children have not yet developed the cognitive complexity required to understand their meanings. However, only English speaking participants have been investigated. Learning collective nouns may be difficult for English speakers because the structure of English emphasises individuals. In contrast, Welsh has a complex number marking system whereby the basic forms of some nouns refer to collections and are modified with a unit ending to individuate one item out of the collection (e.g. coed 'trees' versus coeden 'tree'). Thus, the structure of Welsh may allow greater conceptualisation of entities as collections. This thesis attempts to explore the relationship of such a system on the acquisition of nouns by comparing Welsh- and English-speaking children and adults on a range of cognitive tasks.
Two studies investigate the differences in the distribution of different noun
types across the two languages. First noun distributions in written texts are examined followed by an exploration of the use of different noun types in the language input. A third study examines categorisation and recognition patterns for novel objects and novel nouns across the two languages. A final study explores attention to and recall of number changes across different noun type categories by speakers of the two languages. The results indicate that language differences do influence aspects of cognitive processing across the two language groups. Several factors, including age, object properties and syntax, play a pivotal role in the acquisition of collective categories. These findings are
discussed in relation to the theories of language acquisition and the theory of linguistic relativity.

Date of Award	Sept 2003
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Wales, Bangor
Sponsors	Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) & UNILEVER
Supervisor	Virginia Gathercole (Supervisor)