Does Grammatical Structure Accelerate Number Word Learning? Evidence from Learners of Dual and Non-Dual Dialects of Slovenian

Marušič, Franc; Žaucer, Rok; Plesničar, Vesna; Razboršek, Tina; Sullivan, Jessica; Barner, David

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159208

Cited by 65 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…> Some languages reportedly feature not only singular and dual morphology, but also trial morphology, including Larike, Ngan'gityemerri, Marrithiyel, Anindilyakwa, though the existence of so-called quadral languages with words for sets of "4" is a topic of controversy [63,104,105].…”

Section: Box 3: Languages With Bounded Number Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…> In some languages, like Slovenian (Example I), some dialects have a dual and others do not, creating a natural experiment. Recent studies find that children who learn a dual dialect are quicker than non-dual learners to learn exact meanings for the words 1 and 2, even though these groups have similar amounts of training with counting [105]. One reason for this may be that when children hear the word for 2 in their input, it occurs with dual morphology, such that children who understand the dual can infer that number words used in this context encode sets of 2.…”

Section: Box 3: Languages With Bounded Number Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…and "all", as well as singular, dual, and plural morphology (102)(103)(104)(105)(106). Notably, learning these verbal set representations is correlated with learning small number words.…”

Section: Small Number Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ontogenetic Origins of Human Integer Representations

Carey

Barner

2019

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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127

106

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Do children learn number words by associating them with perceptual magnitudes? Recent studies argue that approximate numerical magnitudes play a foundational role in the development of integer concepts. Against this, we argue that approximate number representations fail both empirically and in principle to provide the content required of integer concepts. Instead, we suggest that children's understanding of integer concepts proceeds in two phases. In the first phase, children learn small exact number word meanings by associating words with small sets. In the second phase, children learn the meanings of larger number words by mastering the logic of exact counting algorithms, which implement the successor function and Hume's principle (that 1-to-1 correspondence guarantees exact equality). In neither phase do approximate number representations play a foundational role.

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Section: Box 3: Languages With Bounded Number Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Box 3: Languages With Bounded Number Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ontogenetic Origins of Human Integer Representations

Carey

Barner

2019

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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127

106

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“…11 At this point, children are classified by tasks like Give-a-Number as 1-knowers, since they treat one as exact, and now deny that there is one banana in a container if there are two or more, despite continuing to agree that there is a banana (Barner, Chow, & Yang, 2009). More generally, on this hypothesis, children's first number word meanings are equivalent to singular, dual, and trial (see also Almoammer, et al, 2013;Marušič, et al, 2016), and are strengthened to mean EXACTLY ONE, EXACTLY TWO and EXACTLY THREE via contrast with stronger scale mates -i.e., by a form of scalar implicature. Critically, this type of inference relies on an appeal to entailment: An expression like, There are two bananas is strengthened to, There are exactly two bananas by ruling out other statements that a speaker might have uttered (e.g., There are three bananas), so long as they are not weaker than the original statement (i.e., are not logically entailed by them).…”

Section: Number Word Learning As Quinian Bootstrappingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrast and entailment: Abstract logical relations constrain how 2- and 3-year-old children interpret unknown numbers

2019

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Do children understand how different numbers are related before they associate them with specific cardinalities? We explored how children rely on two abstract relations -contrast and entailment -to reason about the meanings of 'unknown' number words. Previous studies argue that, because children give variable amounts when asked to give an unknown number, all unknown numbers begin with an existential meaning akin to some. In Experiment 1, we tested an alternative hypothesis, that because numbers belong to a scale of contrasting alternatives, children assign them a meaning distinct from some. In the "Don't Give-a-Number task", children were shown three kinds of fruit (apples, bananas, strawberries), and asked to not give either some or a number of one kind (e.g. Give everything, but not [some/five] bananas). While children tended to give zero bananas when asked to not give some, they gave positive amounts when asked to not give numbers. This suggests that contrast -plus knowledge of a number's membership in a count list -enables children to differentiate the meanings of unknown number words from the meaning of some. Experiment 2 tested whether children's interpretation of unknown numbers is further constrained by understanding numerical entailment relations -that if someone, e.g. has three, they thereby also have two, but if they do not have three, they also do not have four. On critical trials, children saw two characters with different quantities of fish, two apart (e.g. 2 vs. 4), and were asked about the number in-between -who either has or doesn't have, e.g. three. Children picked the larger quantity for the affirmative, and the smaller for the negative prompts even when all the numbers were unknown, suggesting that they understood that, whatever three means, a larger quantity is more likely to contain that many, and a smaller quantity is more likely not to. We conclude by discussing how contrast and entailment could help children scaffold their exact meanings of unknown number words.

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“…form (i.e., marking sets of two, Almoammer et al, 2013). When compared to English-speaking peers, children learning Slovenian or Arabic were faster in acquiring the meaning of the number word two, suggesting that differences in the way languages encode grammatical number lead to concomitant differences in the acquisition of number knowledge (Almoammer et al, 2013;Marušič et al, 2016). What is more, unlike the tripartite system in Slovenian or the singular-plural distinction in English, languages like Chinese or Japanese do not mark number grammatically at all (Le Corre, Li, Huang, Jia, & Carey, 2016;Sarnecka, Kamenskaya, Yamana, Ogura, & Yudovina, 2007).…”

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confidence: 99%

When “one” can be “two”: Cross-linguistic differences affect children’s interpretation of the numeral one

2019

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In English, a lexical distinction is drawn between the indefinite determiner “a” and the numeral “one”. English-speaking children also interpret the two terms differently, with an exact, upper bounded interpretation of the numeral “one”, but no upper bounded interpretation of the indefinite determiner “a”. Unlike English, however, German does not draw a distinction between the indefinite determiner and the numeral one but instead uses the same term “ein/e” to express both functions. To find out whether this cross-linguistic difference affects children’s upper bounded interpretation of “ein/e”, we tested German-speaking children and adults in a truth-value-judgment task and compared their performance to English-speaking children. Our results revealed that German-speaking children differed from both English children and German adults. Whereas the majority of German adults interpreted “ein/e” in an upper bounded way (i.e. as exactly one, not two), the majority of German-speaking children favored a non-upper bounded interpretation (thus accepting two as a valid response to “ein/e”). German-speaking children’s proportion of upper bounded responses to “ein/e” was also significantly lower than English children’s upper bounded responses to “one”. However, German children’s rate of upper bounded responses increased once a number-biasing context was provided. These findings suggest that German-speaking children can interpret “ein/e” in an upper bounded way but that they need additional cues in order to do so. When no such cues are present, German-speaking children differ from both German-speaking adults and from their English-speaking peers, demonstrating that cross-linguistic differences can affect the way speakers interpret numbers.

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Does Grammatical Structure Accelerate Number Word Learning? Evidence from Learners of Dual and Non-Dual Dialects of Slovenian

Cited by 65 publications

References 36 publications

Ontogenetic Origins of Human Integer Representations

Ontogenetic Origins of Human Integer Representations

Contrast and entailment: Abstract logical relations constrain how 2- and 3-year-old children interpret unknown numbers

When “one” can be “two”: Cross-linguistic differences affect children’s interpretation of the numeral one

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