Learning to count begins in infancy: evidence from 18 month olds' visual preferences

Slaughter, Virginia; Itakura, Shoji; Kutsuki, Aya; Siegal, Michael

doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.2602

Cited by 23 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(32 reference statements)

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“…Many children in Western cultures begin experiencing integer words starting in infancy, in the form of hearing parents or caregivers engage in verbal counting (Goldstein, Cole, & Cordes, ). By 18 months, infants are sensitive to some procedural aspects of counting, preferring to watch correct counting over counting that violates the principles of one‐to‐one correspondence or stable order (Ip, Imuta, & Slaughter, ; Slaughter, Itakura, Kutsuki, & Siegal, ). Yet, children apparently do not map between individual number words in the counting sequence and particular approximate numerosities until age 4 years or later.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants recognize counting as numerically relevant

Wang

Feigenson

2019

Developmental Science

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Children do not understand the meanings of count words like “two” and “three” until the preschool years. But even before knowing the meanings of these individual words, might they recognize that counting is “about” the dimension of number? Here in five experiments, we asked whether infants already associate counting with quantities. We measured 14‐ and 18‐month olds’ ability to remember different numbers of hidden objects that either were or were not counted by an experimenter before hiding. As in previous research, we found that infants failed to differentiate four hidden objects from two when the objects were not counted—suggesting an upper limit on the number of individual objects they could represent in working memory. However, infants succeeded when the objects were simply counted aloud before hiding. We found that counting also helped infants differentiate four hidden objects from six (a 2:3 ratio), but not three hidden objects from four (a 3:4 ratio), suggesting that counting helped infants represent the arrays’ approximate cardinalities. Hence counting directs infants’ attention to numerical aspects of the world, showing that they recognize counting as numerically relevant years before acquiring the meanings of number words.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants recognize counting as numerically relevant

Wang

Feigenson

2019

Developmental Science

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“…In order to meet the guidelines at age 48 months, children must begin learning about numbers and counting much earlier than that-and in high-SES households, at least, they do. One study showed that high-SES children in Australia and Japan begin to recognize the counting list of their language and expect it to be paired with a correct counting procedure sometime between 15 and 18 months of age (Slaughter, Itakura, Kutsuki, & Siegal, 2011).…”

Section: Spoken Numbersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Number Knowledge in Dual-Language Learners From Low-SES Households

Sarnecka

Negen

Goldman

2018

Language and Culture in Mathematical Cognition

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A large and growing proportion of American students are dual-language learners, and many live in or near poverty. In order to serve these students, educators must understand their needs. In this chapter we discuss the role of bilingualism in acquiring early number knowledge. Then we briefly review what is known about the ways in which young children represent number, including the approximate number system (ANS) and symbolic representations of exact numbers-both spoken and written. Next, we describe our own large study of early numeracy in preschool-age dual-language-learners (DLLs) from low-socioeconomic-status (SES) households, with comparison groups of high-and low-SES English monolingual preschoolers, as well as dual-language learners from high-SES households. The main conclusions we draw from this study are the following.(1) Educational delays in acquiring basic number skills are attributable to poverty, not to being a dual-language learner. (2) Pre-kindergarten programs such as Head Start seem to provide experience with counting and numbers that is crucial for low-SES children. (3) Given limited resources, it is reasonable to assess the early numeracy of low-income dual-language learners by testing only in their language of instruction, rather than in both of their languages. Testing only in the language of instruction is much less costly and yields very similar information. (4) The SES-related gap in math achievement is much more a gap in symbolic number knowledge (spoken and written numbers) than in ANS acuity. Thus, improving children's symbolic number knowledge should be the focus of interventions seeking to narrow this gap.

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“…Children start to learn these rules about counting as early as 15-18 months of age, depending on how much counting they witness (Slaughter, Itakura, Kutsuki, & Siegal, 2011). But reciting the list of counting words, even while pointing to things, is not the same as understanding how counting reveals the number of things in a set .…”

Section: Acquiring a System Of Representation For Exact Numbersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Certainly, children do treat 'one' as the unique first term in the sequence (e.g., Fuson, 1988). And there is evidence that even children as young as 18 months recognize the words in the counting list as separate from other kinds of words (Slaughter et al, 2011). As far as I know, no one has tested the question of whether children understand that if 'next(k)' = 'next(j)' then 'k'='j,' so that question remains open.…”

Section: Rips's Argument Against Bootstrappingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to represent exact numbers

Sarnecka

2015

Synthese

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This article focuses on how young children acquire concepts for exact, cardinal numbers (e.g., three, seven, two hundred, etc.). I believe that exact numbers are a conceptual structure that was invented by people, and that most children acquire gradually, over a period of months or years during early childhood. This article reviews studies that explore children's number knowledge at various points during this acquisition process. Most of these studies were done in my own lab, and assume the theoretical framework proposed by Carey (2009). In this framework, the counting list ('one,' 'two,' 'three,' etc.) and the counting routine (i.e., reciting the list and pointing to objects, one at a time) form a placeholder structure. Over time, the placeholder structure is gradually filled in with meaning to become a conceptual structure that allows the child to represent exact numbers (e.g., There are 24 children in my class, so I need to bring 24 cupcakes for the party.) A number system is a socially shared, structured set of symbols that pose a learning challenge for children. But once children have acquired a number system, it allows them to represent information (i.e., large, exact cardinal values) that they had no way of representing before.

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Learning to count begins in infancy: evidence from 18 month olds' visual preferences

Cited by 23 publications

References 14 publications

Infants recognize counting as numerically relevant

Infants recognize counting as numerically relevant

Early Number Knowledge in Dual-Language Learners From Low-SES Households

Learning to represent exact numbers

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