Abstract: The mechanisms by which young children learn the exact meanings of number words are relatively unknown. Some linguists and child development experts believe that grammatical morphology drives early number word learning. To investigate this theory, Almoammer et al. (2013) researched number learning across populations with linguistic variation in how they grammatically denote quantity. The sample included English-speaking and Slovenian-speaking toddlers, because English morphology distinguishes between singular and plural, while Slovenian morphology further differentiates between singular, dual, and plural. In support of the theory that morphology drives number learning, the researchers found that children who spoke Slovenian (the language with the dual marker) learned the number two earlier. In the present study, I revisit data collected in tandem with the data in the published works. Unlike the findings of Almoammer et al. (2013), this data does not suggest that Slovenian-speaking children learn two earlier than English-speaking children. In addition to coding the data using the same methods as Almoammer et al. (2013), I created a new way to analyze the task used to assess morphological knowledge, the results of which suggest that morphological knowledge may not necessarily proceed (and thus cannot drive) number word learning.
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