Experiment 3 examined the developmental progression of Mandarin-speaing children in their sensitivity to using the general classifier ge as a cue to individuation.
surprisingly, even 6-yearolds did not possess adult's degree of sensitivity to ge, although previous research has found that ge is only used for concrete entities and is the first classifier children acquire (see Chien et al., 2003;Yamamoto, 2005 for reviews), even though Mandarin may encode the mass-count distinction at the level of the classifier, the acquisition progression is by far slower than English children acquiring mass-count syntax.