Loughborough University
Browse

The plural counts: Inconsistent grammatical number hinders numerical development in pre-schoolers — a cross-linguistic study

Download (1.65 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-02-07, 09:50 authored by Maciej Haman, Katarzyna Lipowska, Mojtaba Soltanlou, Krzysztof CiporaKrzysztof Cipora, Frank Domahs, Hans-Christoph Nuerk

The role of grammar in numerical development, and particularly the role of grammatical number inflection, has already been well-documented in toddlerhood. It is unclear, however, whether the influence of grammatical language structure further extends to more complex later stages of numerical development. Here, we addressed this question by exploiting differences between Polish, which has a complex grammatical number paradigm, leading to a partially inconsistent mapping between numerical quantities and grammatical number, and German, which has a comparatively easy verbal paradigm: 153 Polish-speaking and 124 German-speaking kindergarten children were tested using a symbolic numerical comparison task. Additionally, counting skills (Give-a-Number and count-list), and mapping between non-symbolic (dot sets) and symbolic representations of numbers, as well as working memory (Corsi blocks and Digit span) were assessed. Based on the Give-a-Number and mapping tasks, the children were divided into subset-knowers, CP-knowers-non-mappers, and CP-knowers-mappers.

Linguistic background was related to performance in several ways: Polish-speaking children expectedly progressed to the CP-knowers stage later than German children, despite comparable non-numerical capabilities, and even after this stage was achieved, they fared worse in the numerical comparison task. There were also meaningful differences in spatial-numerical mapping between the Polish and German groups.

Our findings are in line with the theory that grammatical number paradigms influence the development of representations and processing of numbers, not only at the stage of acquiring the meaning of the first number-words but at later stages as well, when dealing with symbolic numbers.

Funding

Differences in the Polish and German language system of representing numbers as the reason for differences in functional properties and numerical development

National Science Center

Find out more...

German Research Foundation (DFG) NU 265/3-1

German Research Foundation (DFG) DO 1433/4-1

LEAD Graduate School & Research Network [GSC1028]

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

Cognition

Volume

235

Pages

1-16

Publisher

Elsevier B.V.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an open access article published by Elsevier under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Acceptance date

2023-01-19

Publication date

2023-02-06

Copyright date

2023

ISSN

0010-0277

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Krzysztof Cipora. Deposit date: 19 January 2023

Article number

105383