Do Children Use Language Structure to Discover the Recursive Rules of Counting?
| Autor: | Vesna Plesničar, Jessica Sullivan, David Barner, Petra Mišmaš, Priyanka Biswas, Rok Žaucer, Franc Marušič, Rose M. Schneider |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Successor cardinal
Cross-Cultural Comparison Male Linguistics and Language Computer science media_common.quotation_subject Concept Formation PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Developmental Psychology Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Natural number computer.software_genre Language Development Task (project management) Artificial Intelligence Successor function Developmental and Educational Psychology Humans Learning bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Psychology|Child Psychology Function (engineering) Child bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Psychology|Developmental Psychology media_common Language Hindi PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Developmental Psychology|Cognitive Development business.industry Timeline Transparency (linguistic) language.human_language bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Psychology|Cognitive Psychology PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Child Preschool language bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Cognitive Psychology Female Artificial intelligence business computer Natural language processing Mathematics |
| Popis: | We test the hypothesis that children acquire knowledge of the successor function — a foundational principle stating that every natural number n has a successor n + 1 — by learning the productive linguistic rules that govern verbal counting. Previous studies report that speakers of languages with less complex count list morphology have greater counting and mathematical knowledge at earlier ages in comparison to speakers of more complex languages (e.g., Miller & Stigler, 1987 ). Here, we tested whether differences in count list transparency affected children’s acquisition of the successor function in three languages with relatively transparent count lists (Cantonese, Slovenian, and English) and two languages with relatively opaque count lists (Hindi and Gujarati). We measured 3.5- to 6.5-year-old children’s mastery of their count list’s recursive structure with two tasks assessing productive counting, which we then related to a measure of successor function knowledge. While the more opaque languages were associated with lower counting proficiency and successor function task performance in comparison to the more transparent languages, a unique within-language analytic approach revealed a robust relationship between measures of productive counting and successor knowledge in almost every language. We conclude that learning productive rules of counting is a critical step in acquiring knowledge of recursive successor function across languages, and that the timeline for this learning varies as a function of count list transparency. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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