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
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