Doctoral Dissertation Research: The effect of naming systems on the acquisition of and reasoning about time concepts

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research investigates whether the use of numerical systems in time concept names affects how adults reason about time and how children acquire time concepts. For example, in Chinese, the word for Monday is literally "weekday one" and January is "month one" whereas English uses arbitrary names with planetary ("Sunday") or mythical origins ("Thursday"). Preliminary evidence shows that in a number of mathematical tasks, children who acquire such systems outperform children acquiring languages with arbitrary names for such time concepts. This research project will test whether a numerical naming system facilitates the child's acquisition of time sequences by comparing monolingual children acquiring Chinese (numerical day- and month-systems), English (non-numerical systems), Latvian (mixed), and Japanese (mixed). Latvian is categorized as mixed because it numerical names for days of the week, but arbitrary names for months. This research addresses a fundamental question about the relationship between language and cognition, namely whether the linguistic coding of a concept in different languages shapes the acquisition and subsequent use of that concept. The results could have profound implications for our understanding of mathematical and temporal reasoning. Given the importance of bilingual education and cross-cultural exchange with China, this research will provide useful insights that could be used to inform language language pedagogy.