Simge Topaloğlu from Harvard University will virtually visit our lab on December 13th and give a speech titled “Does Language Affect Children's Understanding of Number Concepts?”. Please contact lcd@metu.edu.tr 

Abstract: Languages vary in how transparently their number words reflect the underlying base-10 logic of the number system. For example, in English, the word for the number '11' is 'eleven' and the word for the number '20' is 'twenty'. Crucially, the morphological structure of these number words does not reveal that the numbers are composed of 10 and 1 and two 10's, respectively. Some other languages like Mandarin, however, name their numbers transparently, such that the number words corresponding to 11 and 20 translate as 'ten-one' and 'two-ten' and thus provide an explicit linguistic cue to the base-10 compositionality of the numbers. But would children be able to use these linguistic cues to acquire number concepts more easily?

In this talk, I will report the results of our cross-linguistic study that investigated the acquisition of numbers and numerical concepts in 5 languages. These languages differ in terms of how many morphologically opaque number words they have, as well as where in the number line those opaque number words occur. I will discuss whether there is a relationship between the opacity of number words in a language and how easy it is for child speakers of that language to attain number concepts and which particular number concepts are most affected by these cross-linguistic differences.