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，他们区分一组项目中项目数量的容易程度可能与后来在课堂上取得的数学成就有关。虽然许多工作一直致力于确定简单而有效的手段，针对学龄儿童的数学技能，没有工作已经确定了类似的干预措施，以提高婴儿期的数字能力。可以教婴儿注意数字吗？如果是这样的话，这种训练是否具有持久的效果？这个项目的第一个目标是验证简单和廉价的方法，以促进数字的歧视，在学前儿童，早在数学困难可能会遇到在课堂上。该项目的第二个目标是澄清婴儿和幼儿是如何在这些数字和口头计数词的前言语表征之间建立联系的。许多研究都集中在研究学龄前儿童的语言计数能力的获得，然而很少，如果有的话，已经研究了这个问题的接受语言端-也就是说，在什么时候婴儿理解单词可以指数字？哪些因素促进和/或阻碍了他们形成单词和数字之间映射的能力？通过探索语言和数字之间的关系，在前语言婴儿，这个项目将提供一个基本的理解，究竟是什么概念知识的幼儿带来表时，学习计数。该项目的教育和研究一体化计划涉及三管齐下的方法：（1）研究生和本科生在发展研究方面的培训，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）开发一个新的本科生婴儿研究课程，以及（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的消费者。结合起来，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preverbal与数字的口头表示之间的映射，并确定有效的干预措施，以增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preverbal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.