How Children Map Number Words to Their Perceptual Representations

• In Event: Navigating Number Concepts Across Development

Abstract

Children possess remarkably rich intuitions, including the ability to rapidly make judgments about number, length, and area without counting or measuring: deciding which of two plates has more cookies, which piece of licorice is longer, or which slice of cake is bigger. Through development, children also learn to attach language (i.e., number words) to these dimensions, allowing them to verbally quantify their intuitive – albeit imprecise – perceptual representations (e.g., judging that there are “two-hundred-and-four” candies in a jar). How do children link number words to perception?

We explored whether this link is a one-off event, such that once children can verbally estimate in one dimension (e.g., number) they can also estimate in others (e.g., length, area), or whether children must learn to map number words to each dimension independently (e.g., knowing how to verbally estimate in number, but not length and area).

One-hundred-and-seventy 5- to 11-year-olds completed Perceptual Sensitivity (PS) and Verbal Estimation (VE) tasks. In the PS task, children judged which side of a display had more dots (number), which line was longer (length), or which blob was bigger (area), with the ratio (i.e., difficulty) varied within each dimension and accuracy (%correct) as a measure of individual differences in children’s underlying perceptual representations. This task was used to explore whether differences in children’s perceptual representations could explain how well they mapped number words to each dimension in the VE task. In the VE task, children saw new displays and rapidly guessed “how many” items they saw, with novel units provided across dimensions (i.e., a “toma” for number, a “blicket” for length, a “modi” for area; Figure 1). We calculated the average absolute-error-rate (AER; Crollen et al., 2011) and coefficient-of-variation (CV; Cordes et al., 2001) to index accuracy (AER) and variability (CV) in their estimates.

We find that neither perceptual sensitivity nor number word knowledge explains verbal estimation performance: despite having the worst perceptual sensitivity for number and the same range of target values in the VE task, children showed the best number estimation performance. Additionally, once children acquired a link between number words and perceptual number, they could extend this mapping to area and length, despite not having yet learned units for these dimensions in school. Participants were even able to map number words to completely novel perceptual units (i.e., “one” unit represented by 3 dots), which is even more remarkable considering that children had potentially competing links that had to be inhibited (e.g., “one” and 1 item), and that our youngest participants had not yet formally learned to multiply/divide.

Our findings suggest that the link between number words and intuitive perceptual dimensions is a major developmental achievement, as once children can map language to one perceptual dimension, they can easily do so across dimensions and novel units. Understanding this link is not only important for the broader relationship between language and perception, but this is even more important from the perspective of development, as children have access to perceptual representations from birth, but acquire number words slowly throughout development.

Authors

• Denitza Dramkin, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Presenting Author

• Darko Odic, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Non-Presenting Author