The Development of Number Concepts

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

The research investigates how human infants represent numerical concepts and the relationship between learning to count verbally and pre-linguistic number representations. Specifically, the objective is to determine if there are two representations of number in infants, one for small numbers (1, 2, 3, and perhaps 4) and one for large numbers (numbers larger than 3 or 4). Furthermore, we take the first step in investigating how learning the integer list of English (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) may change children's later numerical concepts. Previous studies on number representations in infants and preschool children have shown that there may be a major developmental change in infants' number representations when they have acquired the meaning of the number words at around 3 to 3.5 years of age. Young infants may begin with two systems of number representations, one for small number (1, 2, and 3) and one for large numbers (e.g., 8, 16, etc.). The proposed study tests the hypothesis these two representations are distinct and that verbal counting allows the child to combine these two representations to yield adult-like numerical representations. In other words, because the verbal counting list (1, 2, 3, etc.) imposes certain constraints on conceptual representations, the child has to use both the small number and the large number representations in order to make sense of the counting list. These hypotheses will be investigated with several methods, including a violation of expectancy looking time method with infants, a training-then-transfer method with toddlers, and the how-many and give-a-number tasks widely used in assessing children's understanding of number words. The results of these experiments should lead to a more detailed and deeper understanding of the relationship between pre-linguistic representations of number and children's learning to count. The proposed research will shed basic light on the relationship between language and cognition in the domain of number representations.