Children’s Acquisition of the Number Words and the...
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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 24, 220-251 (1992) Children’s Acquisition of the Number Words and the Counting System KAREN WYNN University of Arizona This paper examines how and when children come to understand the way in which counting determines numerosity and learn the meanings of the number words. A 7-month longitudinal study of 2 and 3 year olds shows that, very early on, children already know that the counting words each refer to a distinct, unique numerosity, though they do not yet know to which numerosity each word refers. It is possible that children learn this in part from the syntax of the number words. Despite this early knowledge, however, it takes children a long time (on the order of a year) to learn how the counting system represents numerosity. This suggests that our initial concept of number is represented quite differently from the way the counting system represents number, making it a difficult task for children to map the one onto the other. o 1%~ Academic press, IIIC. INTRODUCTION How humans come to learn about the counting system of their culture is closely related to the nature of our initial representation of number, because in order to understand counting we must somehow relate it to our prior number concepts. Thus, studying children’s developing understand- ing of counting may shed light on the nature of our early mathematical knowledge. In order to understand the counting system-that is, to know how counting encodes numerosity--children must know the meanings of (some of) the number words. They must also know, at least implicitly, that each word’s position in the number word list relates directly to its meaning-the farther along a word occurs in the list, the greater the numerosity it refers to. Without this knowledge, though children might I am very thankful to Susan Carey and Paul Bloom for their careful readings of and many comments on various drafts of this paper; to Ellen Markman, Kevin Miller, and Virginia Valian for their detailed and helpful comments on an earlier draft; to Karen Fuson, Rachel Gelman, Sandeep Prasada, and Debbie Zaitchik for the discussions I have had with them that have helped to shape this work; and to Nancy Soja for her comments and for generously providing me with some of her unpublished data. I thank Kristine Cordella for her help in testing children and Belinda Cheng for transcribing many hours of videotaped data. I am indebted to the directors, teachers, and children of the Cambridge Montessori School and Bright Horizons Child Care. This material is based on work supported in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship while the author was at MIT. All correspondence should be sent to the author at the Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. 220 OOlO-0285/92 $7.50 Copyright 0 WY2 by Academic Press, Inc. AU rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Children’s Acquisition of the Number Words and the ...semantics.uchicago.edu/.../s09/experimentalsemantics/wynn92.pdf · COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 24, 220-251 (1992) Children’s Acquisition
