Quantity judgments in bilingual speakers (Yudja/Brazilian Portuguese)

This paper contributes to investigations on language-specific encoding of the count mass distinction. Two quantity judgment studies tested adult bilingual speakers in two languages that encode the count-mass distinction differently: Yudja and Brazilian Portuguese. In Yudja all nouns have count denotations. That is, all nouns (including notional mass nouns like 'water') can be directly combined with numerals and with count quantifiers. Conversely, in Brazilian Portuguese count and mass nouns are grammaticalized in different ways. For example, only count nouns can be directly combined with numerals. In two studies with 20 Yudja bilingual adults we investigate whether the performance of Yudja speakers in quantity judgment tasks varied depending on the language that they were operating.