Journal
LANGUAGE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages 147-170Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2016.1263572
Keywords
-
Funding
- NSF [DRL 1348140]
- NSF-STC Center for Brains, Minds and Machines [CCF-1231216]
- Division Of Research On Learning
- Direct For Education and Human Resources [1348140] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The natural numbers may be our simplest, most useful, and best-studied abstract concepts, but their origins are debated. I consider this debate in the context of the proposal, by Gallistel and Gelman, that natural number system is a product of cognitive evolution and the proposal, by Carey, that it is a product of human cultural history. I offer a third proposal that builds on aspects of these views but rejects one tenet that they share: the thesis that counting is central to number. I suggest that children discover the natural numbers when they learn a natural language: especially nouns, number words, and the rules that compose quantified noun phrases. This learning, in turn, depends both on cognitive systems that are innate and shared by other animals, and on our species-specific language faculty. Thus, natural number concepts are unique to humans and culturally universal, yet they are learned.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available