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