Does the conceptual distinction between singular and plural sets depend on language?

Li, Peggy; Ogura, Tamiko; Barner, David; Yang, Shu-Ju; Carey, Susan

doi:10.1037/a0015553

Cited by 63 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 44 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Interestingly, the special status of one element is omnipresent in the singular-plural dichotomy (or numerosity one vs. all-other-numerosities distinction) found in natural language. Moreover, the singular-plural distinction is suggested to have a nonlinguistic conceptual basis (39,40). Neurons tuned to numerosity five were also abundant, but most likely comprises neurons with larger numerosity preference than our experimentally restricted range from one to five.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuronal correlates of a visual “sense of number” in primate parietal and prefrontal cortices

Viswanathan

Nieder

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

148

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

"Sense of number" refers to the classical idea that we perceive the number of items (numerosity) intuitively. However, whether the brain signals numerosity spontaneously, in the absence of learning, remains unknown; therefore, we recorded from neurons in the ventral intraparietal sulcus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of numerically naive monkeys. Neurons in both brain areas responded maximally to a given number of items, showing tuning to a preferred numerosity. Numerosity was encoded earlier in area ventral intraparietal area, suggesting that numerical information is conveyed from the parietal to the frontal lobe. Visual numerosity is thus spontaneously represented as a perceptual category in a dedicated parietofrontal network. This network may form the biological foundation of a spontaneous number sense, allowing primates to intuitively estimate the number of visual items.association cortices | quantity | single-unit recording T he classical idea of a "sense of number" (1,2) suggests that we and animals are endowed with the faculty to perceive the number of items (i.e., numerosity) intuitively. Numerosity might be a perceptual category provided by hard-wired sensory brain processes, without the need to learn what numerosity refers to. Supporting this hypothesis, numerosity is represented by an approximate nonverbal system that allows wild animals (3,4), prelinguistic infants(5,6), and innumerate humans (7,8) to readily estimate set size. Evidence that the brain is set up to assess visual numerosity spontaneously was recently provided by psychophysical and computational experiments: numerosity-just like color or perceptual categories like faces-in humans is susceptible to adaptation (9,10), and is extracted en passant by computational network models (11).So far, the neuronal foundations of a perceptual number sense were never tested because all experiments done so far were performed in animals that learned to discriminate numerosity (12)(13)(14). Work with behaviorally trained nonhuman primates identified a cortical network with individual neurons in the prefrontal (PFC) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) selectively responding to the number of items. Such "number neurons" abstractly represent the number of items across space, time, and modalities (15,16,17). Number neurons have also been traced indirectly in the human brain using functional MRI (fMRI) (18,19).However, because neurons can be trained to represent behaviorally meaningful categories (20,21,22), it has been argued (23) that the presence of previously described number neurons in trained animals might be a product of intense learning, rather than a reflection of a spontaneous number sense. For the same reason, the coding scheme for numerosity has been debated (23): Is the spontaneous neuronal code for numerosity a summation code, as evidenced by monotonic discharges as a function of quantity (14,24), or a labeled-line code as witnessed by numerosity-selective neurons tuned to preferred numerosities analogous to those found in monkeys perform...

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuronal correlates of a visual “sense of number” in primate parietal and prefrontal cortices

Viswanathan

Nieder

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

148

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…that 1 is the number that applies to concepts that have exactly one instance. They seem to do this on the basis of a general ability to distinguish sets containing 1 object from sets containing more objects (Li et al., ). Around 22 months, children acquire the ability to distinguish between collections with one object and collections containing more than one object, whereas before then they were unable to distinguish collections with one object from some collections with more than one object.…”

Section: Learning Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Learning the Natural Numbers as a Child

Buijsman

2017

Nous

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How do we get out knowledge of the natural numbers? Various philosophical accounts exist, but there has been comparatively little attention to psychological data on how the learning process actually takes place. I work through the psychological literature on number acquisition with the aim of characterising the acquisition stages in formal terms. In doing so, I argue that we need a combination of current neologicist accounts and accounts such as that of Parsons. In particular, I argue that we learn the initial segment of the natural numbers on the basis of the Fregean definitions, but do not learn the natural number structure as a whole on the basis of Hume's principle. Therefore, we need to account for some of the consistency of our number concepts with the Dedekind‐Peano axioms in other terms.

show abstract

“…Mandarin has a morpheme (- men ), which, like the Japanese (- tachi ), indicates reference to a collectivity when it is marked on animate nouns and pronouns. However, it is infrequently used relative to the English plural and children learn its meaning many months after English learning children learn the numerical meaning of singular/plural morphology (Li, Ogura, Barner, Yang, & Carey, 2009). Crucially, unlike Japanese and like English, Mandarin has only one count list, its number words always have the same form, 3 and they do not float – they occur pre-nominally only (Kobuchi-Philip, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical morphology supports early number word learning: Evidence from a comparison of young Mandarin and English learners

Corre

Huang

et al. 2016

Cognitive Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous studies showed that children learning a language with an obligatory singular/plural distinction (Russian and English) learn the meaning of the number word for one earlier than children learning Japanese, a language without obligatory number morphology (Barner, Libenson, Cheung, & Takasaki, 2009; Sarnecka, Kamenskaya, Yamana, Ogura, & Yudovina, 2007). This can be explained by differences in number morphology, but it can also be explained by many other differences between the languages and the environments of the children who were compared. The present study tests the hypothesis that the morphological singular/plural distinction supports the early acquisition of the meaning of the number word for one by comparing young English learners to age and SES matched young Mandarin Chinese learners. Mandarin does not have obligatory number morphology but is more similar to English than Japanese in many crucial respects. Corpus analyses show that, compared to English learners, Mandarin learners hear number words more frequently, are more likely to hear number words followed by a noun, and are more likely to hear number words in contexts where they denote a cardinal value. Two tasks show that, despite these advantages, Mandarin learners learn the meaning of the number word for one three to six months later than do English learners. These results provide the strongest evidence to date that prior knowledge of the numerical meaning of the distinction between singular and plural supports the acquisition of the meaning of the number word for one.

show abstract

Does the conceptual distinction between singular and plural sets depend on language?

Cited by 63 publications

References 44 publications

Neuronal correlates of a visual “sense of number” in primate parietal and prefrontal cortices

Neuronal correlates of a visual “sense of number” in primate parietal and prefrontal cortices

Learning the Natural Numbers as a Child

Numerical morphology supports early number word learning: Evidence from a comparison of young Mandarin and English learners

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About