Doctoral Dissertation Research: Integrating Numerical and Linguistic Knowledge in the Exact Interpretation of Numerals

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Words that convey quantity information are everywhere in natural language. Consequently, there must be a way for the part of our mind dedicated to number and the part of our mind dedicated to language to communicate with each other. It has been argued that language and the part of our mind that manages spatial information must also communicate in this way. However, no research has taken tests of children’s number knowledge to see if they are predictive of the quantity-sensitive parts of the language knowledge. The goal of this project is to investigate the number-language connection in children’s exact interpretations of numbers. Though numbers are usually thought of as exact, they can also have, for example, “at least” interpretations (e.g. to eat 6 donuts is to also have eaten 5 donuts). What else matters for children’s abilities to know when a number is exact and when it isn’t? The investigators will test children’s vocabularies to see if they predict exact interpretations. The researchers will also test a part of children’s cognition called executive function, namely, the parts of our minds dedicated to working memory, attention and inhibition, to see whether they are predictive. In this way, the research project will lead to a better understanding of how the different components of our mind work together to allow us to draw a very important type of interpretation of numbers, which are valuable for later quantitative and mathematical thinking in children. This project will study this development in monolingual Spanish-speakers because there is some evidence that numerical thinking can vary across languages. The study includes a video-recorded Truth-Value Judgment Task (TVJT) to measure children’s exactness interpretations as the dependent variable. This procedure will improve the researchers' ability to measure discriminability by using numbers higher than those used in previous research. Children’s numerical knowledge will be measured using conventional tasks from cognitive development to measure numerical estimation: the approximate number system (ANS), using Panamath; counting, using Give-A-Number; number sense and partitioning using Number Sets; and the Number-Line Tasks. These measures should provide evidence of properties of numerical cognition in the exact interpretation of natural language quantifiers and enable the investigators to model how language and number interact, mediated by executive function.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.