Countability distinctions without linguistic cues

This paper investigates experimentally the role played by morphosyntactic cues to atomicity in quantity judgment tasks (Who has more NOUN?, Barner & Snedeker 2005). Two experiments, conducted on English and on French, show that while the absence of linguistic cues to atomicity does not affect quantity judgments in these languages, the absence of the relevant nouns in the quantity judgment prompts has an important impact. In the latter case, quantity judgments can be influenced by the availability of salient portions and alternative dimensions of measurement (Scontras et al. 2017).