Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities in a given domain, or children cannot readily access relevant linguistic alternatives for the target count noun. We advance a new account, appealing to theoretical proposals about underspecification in nominal semantics and the role of the discourse context. Our results demonstrate that there are limits to which children allow partial objects to serve as wholes, and that under certain conditions, adult performance resembles that of children by allowing in partial objects. We propose that children's behavior is in fact licensed by the inherent context dependence of count nouns.

中文翻译：

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儿童和成人评价部分对象时的语境敏感性和可数名词的语义

先前的研究表明，儿童将时空不同的部分对象视为整体对象。这种行为不仅限于计数，还包括在评估和数量比较中包含部分对象。已经提出了对这种表现的多种解释：儿童和成人在概念表示上存在质的差异，儿童缺乏立即将给定领域中的实体个体化的处理技能，或者儿童不能轻易获得目标计数名词的相关语言替代方案。我们提出了一个新的解释，呼吁关于名义语义中的规范不足和话语上下文的作用的理论建议。我们的研究结果表明，儿童允许部分物体作为整体存在是有限度的，并且在某些条件下，成人的表现类似于儿童的表现，允许部分物体进入。我们提出，儿童的行为实际上是由可数名词固有的上下文依赖性许可的。