Poster #34 - Infants’ recognition of the counting routine predicts number knowledge in childhood

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Children typically start to count at around age 2.5, slowly acquiring the meanings of number words over the next few years (Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Sarnecka & Carey, 2008; Wynn, 1992). Not until about 3.5 to 4 years old do they associate particular number words with exact cardinalities, around the time they also associate number words that appear later in the count list with larger approximate quantities (Le Corre & Carey, 2007). Hence learning the count words’ meanings is a protracted process. Yet surprisingly, we recently found that years before understanding specific number words, 14- and 18-month old infants already recognize the counting routine as being “about” number (Wang & Feigenson, 2018). Infants were more likely to represent the approximate cardinality of an array of identical objects after watching the objects being counted, compared to when the objects were not counted.

Although these new findings show an early link between verbal counting and approximate numerosity, it remains unknown whether this early recognition plays any role in later number knowledge, especially in children’s eventual acquisition of number word meanings. To address this question, we first tested 18-month old infants’ ability to represent arrays in which objects were counted aloud prior to hiding (N=20). We also collected parental report of infants’ counting input and vocabulary size. We then tested these same children two years later, at 3.5-years old. At this time, children were tested on a Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity task (Hannula, Lepola, & Lehtinen, 2010), which measured the extent to which they represented arrays in terms of numerosity versus a non-numerical dimension (here, color); children were asked to give a puppet “the same” arrays as an experimenter (without specifying the dimension of sameness). Their performance reflected how accurate they were at spontaneously copying based on numerosity. Next, children’s symbolic number word understanding was tested using a “Give-N” task (Wynn, 1990), in which children were asked to give a puppet particular numbers of tokens.

Our findings revealed a significant correlation between infants’ recognition of counting as numerically relevant at 18 months, and children’s Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity at 3.5 years (r = .61). Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between infants’ recognition of counting and level of number word understanding two years later (r = .63). These correlations remained significant even when controlling for the amount of counting input parents reported for infants, and for children’s vocabulary size (ps < .03).

These results suggest not only that infants understand counting as being numerically relevant, but that this early understanding may be related to the later development of exact number representations. Infants who were better at using observations of verbal counting to attend to approximate numerosity also were better at focusing on numerosity over two years later. They were also more likely to know the exact meanings of the number words from “one” through “six,” suggesting that early counting experiences—even among preverbal infants—may affect the eventual development of verbally mediated exact number knowledge.

Authors

• Jinjing Jenny Wang, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author

• Lisa Feigenson, Johns Hopkins University
  Non-Presenting Author