Evidence for knowledge of the syntax of large numbers in preschoolers

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe aim of this study was to provide evidence for knowledge of the syntax governing the verbal form of large numbers in preschoolers long before they are able to count up to these numbers. We reasoned that if such knowledge exists, it should facilitate the maintenance in short-term memory of lists of lexical primitives that constitute a number (e.g., three hundred forty five) compared with lists containing the same primitives but in a scrambled order (e.g., five three forty hundred). The two types of lists were given to 5-year-olds in an immediate serial recall task. As we predicted, the lists in syntactic order were easier to recall, suggesting that they match some knowledge of the way lexical primitives must be ordered to express large numerosities.Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. IntroductionThe acquisition of the number list has been described as a slow and laborious process, especially for children speaking languages such as English that, contrary to Chinese, do not map directly onto the Hindu-Arabic number system (Miller, Kelly, & Zhou, 2005). Although the rules used to generate large numbers (e.g., two hundred forty five) are more consistent and transparent than those governing the construction of the initial part of the list that must be learned by rote (i.e., from one to twenty), children need to acquire a complex set of syntactic rules combining a limited number of lexical primitives, rules leading to surprising peculiarities in some cases. For example, young French speakers need to understand that although cent neuf (one hundred and nine) and neuf cents (nine hundred) are two legal chains, cent dix (one hundred and ten) is legal but dix 0022-0965/$ -see front matter Ó

When one-two-three beats two-one-three: Tracking the acquisition of the verbal number sequence

“…Despite preschoolers' limited knowledge of the number list, the current study indicates that preschoolers show superior recall performance for lists of lexical primitives in a conventional order as compared to a scrambled order. This result supports and extends previous data reported by Barrouillet et al (2010). In their study, preschool children showed increased recall performance for auditory lists of large numbers (e.g., three ninety hundred two) when the numbers form a syntactically coherent structure allowing regrouping of the numbers in a single large number chunk (e.g., three hundred ninety two), although children of this age cannot yet count up to such large numbers.…”

“…One of the reasons for this gap may be that numbers have been considered as a block of verbal knowledge that, once acquired, is simply transferred to the corresponding numerical quantities. However, Barrouillet et al (2010) showed that children possess some implicit knowledge about two-or three-digit numbers in the counting list long before being able to recite them explicitly as when asked to count up to 1,000. The hypothesis that children would also possess some similar implicit knowledge about the first verbal numbers in the counting list (1-19) has never been empirically tested and validated by a detailed examination of the progressive elaboration of the verbal number sequence.…”

Beginnings of Place Value: How Preschoolers Write Three‐Digit Numbers

“…The alternative possibility, and the one we pursue here, is that young children extract regularities from their incidental experiences of written and spoken forms, and have ideas, perhaps imperfect, about how place value notation works. Consistent with this possibility, one previous study found that preschool children have better memory for well-formed multidigit numbers than non-wellformed numbers (Barrouillet, Thevenot, & Fayol, 2010). Formal instruction must build on or counter children's intuitive knowledge about place value, and thus a description of this early knowledge is a critical open question.…”

Syntactic chunking reveals a core syntactic representation of multi-digit numbers, which is generative and automatic

“…A second study used a similar grammaticality manipulation: Barrouillet et al (2010) asked 5year old children to repeat sequences of number words, and compared their accuracy in fullygrammatical sequences (e.g., thirty two thousand seven hundred five) versus fragmented sequences (two seven five thirty hundred thousand). The children remembered more words in the grammatical sequences than in the fragmented ones.…”

“…For example, if the grammatical condition included the sequence "thirty two", the fragmented condition would include a sequence with the same words in different order -"two thirty". Similar to Barrouillet et al (2010), we always had a grammatical condition, in which each sequence included one or two grammatical segments (e.g., two hundred thirty four), and a fragmented condition, in which the sequence was broken into several grammatical segments (four two thirty hundred). Experiments 1 and 2 also included intermediate conditions, in which the sequence was partially fragmented (e.g., thirty four two hundred).…”