The%20role%20of%20experience%20in%20children

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The role of experience in childrens acquisition
of space, time, and number words

• Elena Nicoladis
• University of Alberta

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The 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

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How are number, space and 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

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Outline

• Background
• Development of abstract concepts
• Relationship between language and thought in
  development
• Number
• Time
• Space
• Do these have anything to do with each other?

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Development of abstract concepts

• 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

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Development of abstract concepts

• 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

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Language and thought in development

• 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

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Language and thought in development

• Chinese and English both encode
• path of motion (he goes up)
• manner of motion (hes running)
• resultatives (he goes byebye)
• Chinese-English bilingual children, graph of
  their dominant language

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

• Im 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

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Some important aspects in learning language
referring to abstract concepts
Number Experience (with number words?)
Time First-person perspective/experience
Space Repackaging??
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Number colleagues

• Jeff Bisanz
• Elaine Ho
• Joyce Leung
• Carmen Rasmussen

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Number language and thought

• Miller, Smith, Zhu, Zhang (1995) argued that
  language transparency was one factor in
  Chinese-speaking childrens 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

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Miller et al.s results
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Culture 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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(No Transcript)
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By dominant language
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Number 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--
  its just later in development or less important
  than frequency

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Learning 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

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Childrens use of number words
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Adults use of number words
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Summary of results of number study

• 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

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Take-home message about numbers

• Experience matters with learning number words
• We dont yet know what about experience makes a
  difference probably academic setting helps with
  11
• Peers?
• Educators do something interesting with numbers?

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My partner in time

• Peter J. Lee

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Time 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

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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)

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Study 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 24 to 5 years

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Percentage errors by age
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Number of temporal references
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Summary 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

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Study 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

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Study 2

• 60 children between 3 and 5 years
• Rank order correlations
• 0-1, with higher number indicating a closer
  relationship between the two orders

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Our pictures
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Average rank order correlations
t(28) 1.5, p gt 0.14
24 Control 100 48 Prosp. 100
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Average rank order correlations
t(32) -3.54, p gt 0.001
24 Control 100 57 Retro. 100
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Summary 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

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Take-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

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Space colleagues

• Edward Cornell
• Melissa Gates

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What does where mean?

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

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Does where mean route or location?

• 5 children interacting with parents at 20, 26,
  30, 36
• Looked at childrens responses to parents use of
  where
• Transcripts already coded for childrens gesture
  use (including points)

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Results
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Summary 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

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Space 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

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Toy pointing set-up
Toy
Sofa
Pointing box
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Results
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Summary 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

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Interpretation 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?

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Some important aspects in learning language
referring to abstract concepts
Number Experience (with number words?)
Time First-person perspective/experience
Space Repackaging??
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Learning abstract concepts

• Socially interesting
• E.g., highly frequent
• First-person experience --gt ability to use other
  perspectives
• Time (before/after)
• Space (late conceptualization of rooms as
  locations)
• Absolute --gt relative
• Number (90 a lot) --gt 96 vs. 97
• Where location of objects, route to rooms --gt
  location

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Isnt this just restating what Piaget said?

• Similarities
• Importance of first-person perspective
• N.b., I am not saying that children ARE
  egocentric
• Absolute --gt relative
• Differences
• Acknowledgement of innate/early knowledge
• Social worlds the context matters a lot
• Children are not initially concrete thinkers

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Some future directions

• I havent really looked well at the meaning of
  childrens number words
• Spell out what important in social context
  means
• Some indication that think might follow the
  same pattern.