Poster #29 - Infants’ Mapping between Words and Number

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Unlike most other words that children learn at a young age, number words are unique because they are used to describe the quantity of a set of objects, not any one property of the object itself (Wynn, 1992). Furthermore, because number is not tied to any one sensory modality, to learn the meaning of number words, one must be able to abstract the quantity from its visual, auditory or physical representation. Although a myriad of studies have explored the extent to which infants are able to represent number from early on, less is known about the way infants learn the meaning of number words and whether even young infants can readily map words to specific set sizes.
Thus, in the current series of studies, we investigated infants’ ability to map novel words onto distinct quantities at two distinct age groups: 13-15 month olds and 18-22 month olds. In this we presented infants with two arrays of items of different set sizes which were consistently labeled with a distinct verbal label. In preferential looking test trials, infants were presented with both arrays of items and heard one of the verbal labels. We measured whether infants had learned the set size associated with each verbal label by comparing how long infants looked to the correct and incorrect set size. We first tested both our age groups on a 4v8 comparison, a ratio that infants at both age groups should easily be able to discriminate (infants by 6 months have been shown to discriminate a 1:2 ratio; Xu & Spelke, 2000). Although our youngest age group was not able to map the correct verbal label to each set size (p >.60), slightly older infants (18-22 month olds) had no difficulty with this (p < .05). Next, we tested our oldest age group on a 2v3 comparison. While this is a slightly more difficult ratio, evidence suggest that infants by 9 months can discriminate a 2:3 ratio (Xu, Spelke & Goddard, 2005) yet we found that our 18-22 month olds were not able to map words onto to correct verbal label for this comparison (p >.67).
Together, these results provide strong support to indicate that while 13-15-month-old infants can discriminate between different quantities, they have yet to understand that a single word can also refer to set cardinality. It is not until 18 months of age that they begin to grasp this concept, although the number ratio they are tested on, appears to affect their ability to do so.

Authors

• Sophie Savelkouls, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Sara Cordes, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author