The role of The role of experience in experience in

children’s children’s acquisition of space, acquisition of space,

time, and number time, and number wordswords

Elena NicoladisElena Nicoladis

University of AlbertaUniversity of Alberta

The big questionThe big question

• How do children learn meaning of words referring to abstract concepts?– Development of abstract concepts– Relationship of language to conceptual

development

• Focus here: number, time and space

How are number, space and How are number, space and time related?time related?

• Piaget vs. Kant

• I have colleagues who are interested in these concepts

• Children learn something about these concepts at an early age and their understanding/use of these concepts changes with age

OutlineOutline• Background

– Development of abstract concepts– Relationship between language and thought

in development

• Number• Time• Space• Do these have anything to do with each

other?

Development of abstract Development of abstract conceptsconcepts

• Piaget– Rational knowledge emerges from early

sensorimotor experience– For example, infants have implicit

understanding of causality– Therefore abstract concepts come from

concrete concepts– For example, temporal concepts come from

spatial concepts• Taller people are older

Development of abstract Development of abstract conceptsconcepts

• Since Piaget– Infancy research

• Infants react to perceptual stimuli on what could be described as abstract basis

• E.g., Can tell the difference between 1 and 2 visually; Can differentiate differently ordered images

– The function of the concepts could be important

• Particularly sociocultural function

Language and thought in Language and thought in developmentdevelopment

• Language does not necessarily map onto preverbal concepts

• For ex., Korean- and English-speaking children encode different aspects of spatial relations (Bowerman & Choi, 1990)

• Learning spatial language has to do with frequency in the input

Language and thought in Language and thought in developmentdevelopment

• Chinese and English both encode:– path of motion (he goes up)– manner of motion (he’s running)– resultatives (he goes byebye)

• Chinese-English bilingual children, graph of their dominant language

How do children learn language How do children learn language referring to number, time and referring to number, time and

space?space?

• I’m going to start with words– Number words 1-100 (0)– Temporal words (particularly before and after)– Spatial word: Where

• Converging methodology– “Naturalistic” data– Experimental data

• Assumption: language use reflects thoughts

Some important aspects in Some important aspects in learning language referring to learning language referring to

abstract conceptsabstract concepts

Number Experience (with number words?)

Time First-person perspective/experience

Space Repackaging??

Number colleaguesNumber colleagues

• Jeff Bisanz

• Elaine Ho

• Joyce Leung

• Carmen Rasmussen

Number language and thoughtNumber language and thought

• Miller, Smith, Zhu, & Zhang (1995) argued that language transparency was one factor in Chinese-speaking children’s early acquisition of number words

• Study compared 3-5 year old American English-speaking children with Chinese-speaking children in China

• Asked them to count as high as they could

Miller et al.’s resultsMiller et al.’s results

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1 8 15 22 29 36 43 50 57 64 71 78 85 92 99

AmericanChinese

Culture not controlled forCulture not controlled for

• We asked 25 Chinese-English bilingual children living in Alberta to count as high as they could– Once in Chinese– Once in English

• Bilingual children often speak one language better than the other

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1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 41 45 49 53 57 61 65 69 73 77 81 85 89 93 97 101 105 109

Maximum Number

% of Children Reaching Number

English

Chinese

By dominant languageBy dominant language

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English ChineseDominance

Highest Count

EnglishChinese

Number study conclusionsNumber study conclusions

• Children counted better in the language they knew better

• Suggesting that experience plays a role in learning number words

• We have not disproven language transparency-- it’s just later in development or less important than frequency

Learning number wordsLearning number words

• How does experience could play a role?– Frequency of hearing– Frequency of practicing– Earlier and/or higher numbers heard– Earlier and/or higher numbers used

• Study: looks at Chinese-speaking children in Hong Kong speaking with adults

Children’s use of number wordsChildren’s use of number words

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Number words

% sessions

CKTMHZLTFLLY

Adults’ use of number wordsAdults’ use of number words

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Number words

% sessions

CKTMHZLTFLLY

Summary of results of number Summary of results of number studystudy

• Children and adults talk a lot about 1-3 and a fair bit about 4-10

• Higher numbers are infrequent

• Two hints about Chinese advantage– One child suddenly counted to 28 about a

month after his third birthday– Two older sisters wandered through,

assigning themselves math problems

Take-home message about Take-home message about numbersnumbers

• Experience matters with learning number words

• We don’t yet know what about experience makes a difference: probably academic setting helps with 11+– Peers?– Educators do something interesting with

numbers?

My partner in timeMy partner in time

• Peter J. Lee

Time word backgroundTime word background

• Children are lousy with time words (concepts) before school age

• They confuse before/after, yesterday/tomorrow

• Four-year olds do not order events well

• Piaget argued that children learn time as metaphor for space– Most experiments used speed as dependent

measure

But…But…

• Do children learn about time as metaphor for space?

• Infants are sensitive to order of images as young as 8 months

• Marilyn Shatz has argued that children often learn a large category (like colour) and make mistakes within that category (blue for green)

Study 1Study 1

• Time words in naturalistic conversation

• We looked at lots of temporal words (before, after, yesterday,today, tomorrow, hour, minute, day, week, year, etc.)

• English-speaking child (Abe) in interaction with his parents from 2;4 to 5 years

Percentage errors by agePercentage errors by age

Trial Block(26 week sequential periods)

1 2 3 4 5

Percentage ofWithin Block Errors

0123456789

101112131415

(mean error rate)

Number of temporal referencesNumber of temporal references

Speaker

Child Adult

Frequency of Utterences

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Future Past Present

Summary of resultsSummary of results

• Abe made very few errors in using time words

• Context of use of time words– Reconstructing past events for one parent– Negotiating future events

• One study showed that four-year olds are better at ordering everyday events than decontextualized story events

Study 2Study 2• We used the same events for children to

sort but varied their experience with them• 3 Conditions:

– Control condition: Sort Ms. Potatohead according to how she must have been built

– Retrospective condition: Build Ms. Potatohead then sort the cards in that order

– Prospective condition: Plan with experimenter how to build Ms. Potatohead then do it in that order

Study 2Study 2• 60 children between 3 and 5 years• Rank order correlations:

– 0-1, with higher number indicating a closer relationship between the two orders

Our picturesOur pictures

Average rank order correlationsAverage rank order correlations

Control Prospective

Mean Within Sub.

Rank Order Correlations

0.35

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0.45

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0.55

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0.65

t(28) = 1.5, p > 0.14

24% Control 100%

48% Prosp. 100%

Average rank order correlationsAverage rank order correlations

Control Retrospective

Mean Within Sub.

Rank Order Correlations

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0.1

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t(32) = -3.54, p > 0.001

24% Control 100%

57% Retro. 100%

Summary of study 2Summary of study 2

• We showed that children are better at retrospective ordering than logical ordering

• They are not significantly better at prospective ordering than logical ordering on this task

Take-home messageTake-home message

• First-person experience can make a difference in understanding or performing on ordering task

• Piaget correct that logic follows personal experience in development

• Understanding time does not necessarily come from understanding space first

Space colleaguesSpace colleagues

• Edward Cornell

• Melissa Gates

What does “where” mean?What does “where” mean?

• We know that children use “where” very early-- one of the earliest question words

• Studies of children’s nonverbal conceptualizations of space have shown that they tend to think of route earlier than location

• Easier to think along horizontal planes than vertical planes

Does “where” mean route or Does “where” mean route or location?location?

• 5 children interacting with parents at 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, 3;6

• Looked at children’s responses to parents’ use of “where”

• Transcripts already coded for children’s gesture use (including points)

ResultsResults

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2;0 2;6 3;0 3;60

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70Parents: object in sightChildren: point to object

Summary of resultsSummary of results

• Children pointed more as parents asked more genuine “where” questions

• We could not distinguish whether children meant location or route – points usually were along both route and

location

Space Study 2Space Study 2

• 42 children from 2-4 years

• Two questions about “where”:– Point to a hidden object– Point to rooms

• Same floor• Different floor

• Dependent measures: points to route vs. points to location

Toy pointing set-upToy pointing set-up

Sofa

Pointing box

Toy

ResultsResults

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30 mos. 42 mos. 54 mos.

Age group

% location

Room: same floorRoom: different floorToy

Summary of resultsSummary of results

• Children always point to the location of a hidden object

• Younger children point to route to rooms while older children (4 year olds) point to location

Interpretation of resultsInterpretation of results

• As children get older they think of rooms as locations

• They can think about large space AS IF it is small space

• Maybe around 4 years of age children could switch strategies of “where” responses– “Where is the bathroom?”

Some important aspects in Some important aspects in learning language referring to learning language referring to

abstract conceptsabstract concepts

Number Experience (with number words?)

Time First-person perspective/experience

Space Repackaging??

Learning abstract conceptsLearning abstract concepts• Socially interesting

– E.g., highly frequent

• First-person experience --> ability to use other perspectives– Time (before/after)– Space (late conceptualization of rooms as locations)

• Absolute --> relative– Number (90 = a lot) --> 96 vs. 97– Where = location of objects, route to rooms -->

location

Isn’t this just restating what Isn’t this just restating what Piaget said?Piaget said?

• Similarities– Importance of first-person perspective

N.b., I am not saying that children ARE egocentric

– Absolute --> relative

• Differences– Acknowledgement of innate/early knowledge– Social worlds: the context matters a lot– Children are not initially concrete thinkers

Some future directionsSome future directions

• I haven’t really looked well at the meaning of children’s number words

• Spell out what “important in social context” means

• Some indication that “think” might follow the same pattern….