What Do Singular Indefinites Mean in Child English

English is a language which expresses the semantic distinction between singular and plural morphosyntactically with a determiner and a nominal head. In the sentences in (1a) and (1b), the presence/absence of the indefinite determiner a and the absence/presence of the plural suffix –s mark the singularity/plurality of articles John is looking for. Japanese, on the other hand, is a language which does not necessarily express the semantic distinction morpho-syntactically. The language does not have any indefinite determiner, and the nominal head is “underspecified” in number. It allows nominals to occur in their bare forms and the forms are ambiguous between singular and plural interpretations. Thus, the interpretations associated with (1a) and (1b) are both available with a single sentence in (1c).