Rutgers faculty member Dr. Kristen Syrett, along with co-authors Premvanti Patel (Yale University) and Athulya Aravind (Yale University, MIT), recently published a study examining how children and adults understand language when describing whole and partial objects.
They found that children and adults differ in how they interpret partial objects when quantity matters. In two experiments, participants evaluated rules involving objects such as cups, forks, and plates. Adults generally treated partial objects as less than a whole, while children were more likely to treat them as equivalent to whole objects. The findings provide new insight into how children develop their understanding of language, quantity, and how objects are categorized.
Their published article, titled “Children and adults’ treatment of partial objects in bounded quantificational contexts,” can be found here!