The Origin of Concepts

Carey, Susan

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195367638.001.0001

Cited by 1,567 publications

(1,257 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

1,181

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Today, however, there is ample evidence demonstrating that infants possess a core of conceptual knowledge that includes notions of mathematics, social cognition and language 37 . Although most evidence comes from behavioral studies, various aspects of infant thought are encapsulated in the mind, unexpressed by any motor effector 38 .…”

Section: R E V I E Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuroscience and education: prime time to build the bridge

et al. 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: R E V I E Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuroscience and education: prime time to build the bridge

et al. 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Carey (2009) suggests that the limitations of children's small-set representational system may drive the timing of the CP-transition. In what appears to be an otherwise puzzling coincidence, children become CP-knowers roughly at the capacity limit of their small-set representational system-around 3 or 4.…”

Section: The Developmental Progression Of Number Acquisition May Resumentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our formal modeling is inspired by the bootstrapping theory of Carey (2009), who proposes that children observe a relationship between numerical quantity and the counting routine in early number words, and use this relationship to inductively define the meanings of later number words. The present work offers several contributions beyond Carey's formulation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The bootstrapping debate Carey (2009) argues that the development of number meanings can be explained by (Quinian) bootstrapping. Bootstrapping contrasts with both associationist accounts and theories that posit an innate successor function that can map a representation of a number N onto a representation of its successor N + 1 (Gallistel & Gelman, 1992;Gelman & Gallistel, 1978;Leslie, Gelman, & Gallistel, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Bootstrapping in a language of thought: A formal model of numerical concept learning

Piantadosi¹,

Tenenbaum²,

2012

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In acquiring number words, children exhibit a qualitative leap in which they transition from understanding a few number words, to possessing a recursive system of interrelated numerical concepts. We present a computational framework for understanding this inductive leap as the consequence of statistical inference over a sufficiently powerful representational system. We provide an implemented model that is powerful enough to learn number word meanings and other related conceptual systems from naturalistic data. The model shows that bootstrapping can be made computationally and philosophically well-founded as a theory of number learning. Our approach demonstrates how learners may combine core cognitive operations to build sophisticated representations during the course of development, and how this process explains observed developmental patterns in number word learning.

show abstract

“…As a case study of the relationship between language and thought, number has a key advantage over other domains: the pre-linguistic mechanisms for representing numerical information are relatively well-understood (Cantlon et al, 2009;Carey, 2009;Dehaene, 1997). Numerical cognition in infants and non-human animals is characterized by two distinct systems (Feigenson et al, 2004).…”

Section: Numerical Cognition and Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal interference suppresses exact numerical representation

Frank

Fedorenko

Lai

et al. 2012

Cognitive Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language for number is an important case study of the relationship between language and cognition because the mechanisms of non-verbal numerical cognition are well-understood. When the Pirahã (an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe who have no exact number words) are tested in non-verbal numerical tasks, they are able to perform one-to-one matching tasks but make errors in more difficult tasks. Their pattern of errors suggests that they are using analog magnitude estimation, an evolutionarily-and developmentally-conserved mechanism for estimating quantities. Here we show that English-speaking participants rely on the same mechanisms when verbal number representations are unavailable due to verbal interference. Followup experiments demonstrate that the effects of verbal interference are primarily manifest during encoding of quantity information, and-using a new procedure for matching difficulty of interference tasks for individual participants-that the effects are restricted to verbal interference. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that number words are used online to encode, store, and manipulate numerical information. This linguistic strategy complements, rather than altering or replacing, non-verbal representations.

show abstract

The Origin of Concepts

Cited by 1,567 publications

References 0 publications

Neuroscience and education: prime time to build the bridge

Neuroscience and education: prime time to build the bridge

Bootstrapping in a language of thought: A formal model of numerical concept learning

Verbal interference suppresses exact numerical representation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About