CAREER: Understanding and Facilitating Numerical Discriminations in Infancy

婴儿对周围世界的数字信息很敏感，有证据表明，他们区分一组项目数量的容易程度可能与后来在课堂环境中的数学成绩有关。虽然许多工作致力于寻找简单有效的方法来提高学龄儿童的数学技能，但还没有任何工作发现类似的干预措施来提高婴儿期的数学能力。可以教婴儿注意数字吗？如果是这样，这种培训有持久的效果吗？该项目的首要目标是验证简单且廉价的方法，以便早在课堂上遇到数学困难之前，就可以促进还不会说话的婴儿进行数字辨别。该项目的第二个目标是阐明婴儿和幼儿如何在这些数字的前语言表示和口头计数词之间建立联系。许多研究都集中在检查学龄前儿童言语计数的习得，但很少有研究（如果有的话）检查这个问题的接受性语言末端——即婴儿在什么时候理解单词可以指代数字？哪些因素促进和/或阻碍他们形成单词和数字之间映射的能力？通过探索还没有语言能力的婴儿的语言和数字之间的关系，该项目将对幼儿在学习计数时到底会带来哪些概念知识提供基本的了解。该项目的教育和研究一体化计划涉及三管齐下的方法：（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学生启动暑期实习计划；（2）开发一门新的本科生婴儿期研究课程；（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系列讲座，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，该项目有可能影响波士顿学院和整个波士顿社区的教育，让我们了解前语言与数字数字表示之间的映射，并确定有效的干预措施，以增强前语言数学基础，这些干预措施可以在更早的年龄和整个社会经济领域实施。

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.