Gathercole V C
J Exp Child Psychol. 1985 Aug;40(1):73-104. doi: 10.1016/0022-0965(85)90066-9.
Three experiments explored the development of three linguistic aspects of more in children's speech. Subjects were 56 children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. Experiment 1 addressed the nature of the early semantic content of more. Experiment 2 examined the child's differentiation of mass more from count more. Experiment 3 explored the child's use of more as a comparative marker on adjectives. The results suggest, first, that the child initially stores the meaning of more with a prototype, rather than with some more systematic, featural representation. In addition, children's linguistic understanding of the dual use of more as a quantifier of mass amounts and count amounts does not appear to develop until long after they have been using more appropriately in unambiguous contexts. Finally, children learn to use more as a marker on comparatives only after they have acquired -er as a comparative marker, and some time after they have been using more successfully in nonadjectival constructions.
三项实验探究了儿童言语中“more”的三个语言方面的发展情况。研究对象是56名年龄在2岁6个月至6岁之间的儿童。实验1探讨了“more”早期语义内容的本质。实验2考察了儿童对表示不可数名词数量的“more”和表示可数名词数量的“more”的区分。实验3探究了儿童将“more”用作形容词比较标记的情况。结果表明，首先，儿童最初是通过一个原型来存储“more”的含义，而不是通过一些更系统的特征表示。此外，儿童对“more”作为不可数名词数量和可数名词数量的量词的双重用法的语言理解，似乎直到他们在明确的语境中正确使用“more”很久之后才得以发展。最后，儿童在掌握了“-er”作为比较标记之后，并且在他们成功地在非形容词结构中使用“more”一段时间之后，才学会将“more”用作比较标记。
