The next talk in the CDC seminar series will be given by:
Katalin É. Kiss, Mátyás Gerőcs, Tamás Zétényi, Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy - BME
Date: Wednesday, April 4, 2012, 5 PM
Location: Cognitive Development Center at CEU, Hattyú u. 14, 3rd floor
PLEASE NOTE: Our seminar room has a limited capacity. Please arrive
early to ensure you get a seat! The talk will begin promptly at 5.
The linguistic roots of multiplication
Abstract:
It is a well-established fact, confirmed by various experiments, that
preschoolers, human infants, and even non-human primates can perform
intuitive addition and subtraction. Much less evidence has been put
forth testifying that children are capable of multiplicative operations
on sets before receiving formal training. What makes evidence of
intuitive multiplication hard to obtain is that in the visual and
auditive domains multiplication is usually indistinguishable from
repeated addition.
Our talk will claim that multiplication operations are routinely
performed by children prior to schooling; they are encoded by syntactic
means in such doubly quantified sentences as the Hungarian Három maci is két autóval játszik ’Three
teddy bears (each) are playing with two cars’, and their English
equivalents (cf. Musolino 2009). We will report on three experiments
testing Hungarian preschoolers’ strategies of interpreting such
sentences, and will show that, given certain syntactic and pragmatic
clues, children interpret the two numerically modified expressions as a
multiplier and a multiplicand, and also compute the product of
multiplication, presumably relying on their approximate number system.
Cognitive Science events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events