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Keywords: In situ Fe K-edge XAS, highly-concentrated FeCl2 aqueous solutions, local structure, coordination number, Power-to-Solid, energy storage technology
Published in RUNG: 28.01.2021; Views: 2728; Downloads: 66  (1 vote)
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Abstract: Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragmatic enrichment, rather than lexically. For example, the word one may gain its exact interpretation because the presence of the immediate successor two licenses the pragmatic inference that one implies “one, and not two”. To investigate the possible role of pragmatic enrichment in the development of exact representations, we looked outside the test case of number to grammatical morphological markers of quantity. In particular, we asked whether children can derive an exact interpretation of singular noun phrases (e.g., “a button”) when their language features an immediate “successor” that encodes sets of two. To do this, we used a series of tasks to compare English-speaking children who have only singular and plural morphology to Slovenian-speaking children who have singular and plural forms, but also dual morphology, that is used when describing sets of two. Replicating previous work, we found that English-speaking preschoolers failed to enrich their interpretation of the singular and did not treat it as exact. New to the present study, we found that 4- and 5-year-old Slovenian-speakers who comprehended the dual treated the singular form as exact, while younger Slovenian children who were still learning the dual did not, providing evidence that young children may derive exact meanings pragmatically.
Keywords: Acquisition of quantity expressions, Acquisition of exactness, Pragmatics of grammatical number, Inferences on quantity, Dual, Slovenian
Published in RUNG: 13.12.2020; Views: 2396; Downloads: 0
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Abstract: We test the hypothesis that children acquire knowledge of the successor function — a foundational principle stating that every natural number n has a successor n + 1 — by learning the productive linguistic rules that govern verbal counting. Previous studies report that speakers of languages with less complex count list morphology have greater counting and mathematical knowledge at earlier ages in comparison to speakers of more complex languages (e.g., Miller & Stigler, 1987). Here, we tested whether differences in count list transparency affected children’s acquisition of the successor function in three languages with relatively transparent count lists (Cantonese, Slovenian, and English) and two languages with relatively opaque count lists (Hindi and Gujarati). We measured 3.5- to 6.5-year-old children’s mastery of their count list’s recursive structure with two tasks assessing productive counting, which we then related to a measure of successor function knowledge. While the more opaque languages were associated with lower counting proficiency and successor function task performance in comparison to the more transparent languages, a unique within-language analytic approach revealed a robust relationship between measures of productive counting and successor knowledge in almost every language. We conclude that learning productive rules of counting is a critical step in acquiring knowledge of recursive successor function across languages, and that the timeline for this learning varies as a function of count list transparency.
Keywords: Cross-linguistic Count list Successor function Natural number concepts Number acquisition Conceptual development
Published in RUNG: 05.01.2020; Views: 3246; Downloads: 0
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Keywords: isogeometric discretization, condition number estimates, NURBS
Published in RUNG: 13.11.2018; Views: 2879; Downloads: 0
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Keywords: agreement, atomicity, classifier, countability, dual number, numeral, Russian, Bulgarian
Published in RUNG: 21.03.2018; Views: 3920; Downloads: 0
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