Doctoral Dissertation Research: The effect of naming systems on the acquisition of and reasoning about time concepts

本文主要研究时间概念名称中数字系统的使用是否会影响成人对时间的推理以及儿童对时间概念的习得。例如，在中文中，“星期一”的字面意思是“第一天”，“一月”是“第一个月”，而英语则使用任意名称，有行星（“星期日”）或神话起源（“星期四”）。初步证据表明，在许多数学任务中，习得这种系统的儿童比习得具有任意时间概念名称的语言的儿童表现得更好。本研究项目将通过比较单语儿童习得中文（数字日和月系统）、英语（非数字系统）、拉脱维亚语（混合）和日语（混合），来测试数字命名系统是否有助于儿童对时间序列的习得。拉脱维亚语被归类为混合型，因为它用数字来表示一周中的几天，而用任意的名字来表示月份。本研究解决了一个关于语言和认知之间关系的基本问题，即不同语言对一个概念的语言编码是否会影响该概念的习得和随后的使用。研究结果可能会对我们理解数学和时间推理产生深远的影响。鉴于双语教育和与中国的跨文化交流的重要性，本研究将为语言教学提供有用的见解。

This dissertation research investigates whether the use of numerical systems in time concept names affects how adults reason about time and how children acquire time concepts. For example, in Chinese, the word for Monday is literally "weekday one" and January is "month one" whereas English uses arbitrary names with planetary ("Sunday") or mythical origins ("Thursday"). Preliminary evidence shows that in a number of mathematical tasks, children who acquire such systems outperform children acquiring languages with arbitrary names for such time concepts.This research project will test whether a numerical naming system facilitates the child's acquisition of time sequences by comparing monolingual children acquiring Chinese (numerical day- and month-systems), English (non-numerical systems), Latvian (mixed), and Japanese (mixed). Latvian is categorized as mixed because it numerical names for days of the week, but arbitrary names for months.This research addresses a fundamental question about the relationship between language and cognition, namely whether the linguistic coding of a concept in different languages shapes the acquisition and subsequent use of that concept. The results could have profound implications for our understanding of mathematical and temporal reasoning. Given the importance of bilingual education and cross-cultural exchange with China, this research will provide useful insights that could be used to inform language language pedagogy.