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 _______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-subscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-unsubscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu