CAREER: Understanding and Facilitating Numerical Discriminations in Infancy

婴儿对他们周围世界中的数字信息很敏感，有证据表明，他们辨别一组项目数量的容易程度可能与他们后来在课堂上取得的数学成就有关。虽然已经有很多工作致力于寻找针对学龄儿童数学技能的简单而有效的方法，但还没有工作确定类似的干预措施来提高婴儿的数字能力。可以教婴儿注意数字吗？如果是这样的话，这种培训会有持久的效果吗？这个项目的第一个目标是验证简单和廉价的方法，在课堂上可能遇到数学困难之前很久就促进了先于语言的婴儿的数字辨别。该项目的第二个目标是阐明婴幼儿如何在数字的这些言语前表征和言语计数词之间建立联系。许多研究都集中在考察学龄前儿童言语计数的习得，但很少有人研究这个问题的接受性语言--也就是说，婴儿在什么程度上理解单词可以指代数字？是什么因素促进和/或阻碍了他们在单词和数字之间形成映射的能力？通过探索言语前婴儿的语言和数字之间的关系，这个项目将提供一个基础的理解，确切地说，幼儿在学习数数时带来了什么概念性知识。该项目的教育和研究一体化计划涉及三个方面：(1)发展研究方面的研究生和本科生培训，包括为研究机会有限的本科院校的学生启动暑期实习计划；(2)开发一门新的本科幼儿研究课程；(3)为大波士顿地区有兴趣了解婴儿认知的父母创建免费的年度讲座系列，目的是帮助父母成为科学信息和面向婴儿的市场产品的更好消费者。总而言之，这个项目有可能影响波士顿学院和整个波士顿社区的教育，让我们了解言语前与数字的言语表征之间的映射，并确定有效的干预措施，以加强可以在更早的年龄和整个社会经济范围内实施的数学的言语前基础。

Infants are sensitive to numerical information in the world around them, and evidence suggests that the ease with which they discriminate the number of items in a set may be correlated with later achievements in mathematics in the classroom setting. While much work has been dedicated to identifying simple and effective means for targeting math skills in school-aged children, no work has identified similar interventions for enhancing numerical abilities in infancy. Can infants be taught to attend to number? If so, does this training have lasting effects? The first goal of this project is to validate simple and inexpensive methods for facilitating numerical discriminations in preverbal infants, long before mathematics difficulties may be encountered in the classroom. The second goal of the project is to clarify how it is infants and young children make the connection between these preverbal representations of number and verbal count words. Many studies have focused on examining the acquisition of verbal counting in preschoolers, however few, if any have examined the receptive language end of this question -- namely, at what point do infants understand that words can refer to numbers? What factors facilitate and/or hinder their ability to form the mapping between words and numerosities? By exploring the relationship between language and number in preverbal infants, this project will provide a foundational understanding of exactly what conceptual knowledge young children bring to the table when learning to count. The educational and research integration plan of the project involves a three-pronged approach of (1) graduate and undergraduate training in developmental research, including the initiation of a summer internship program for students at undergraduate institutions with limited research opportunities, (2) the development of a new undergraduate research-based course on infancy, and (3) the creation of a free annual lecture series for parents in the greater Boston area interested in learning about infant cognition, with the goal of helping parents become better consumers of scientific information and of infant-oriented marketed products. Combined, this project has the potential to impact education both at Boston College and throughout the Boston community, to inform our understanding of the mapping between preverbal with verbal representations of number, and to identify effective interventions to enhance the preverbal foundations of mathematics that can be implemented at a much earlier age and across the socioeconomic spectrum.