Izard Véronique, Pica Pierre, Spelke Elizabeth, Dehaene Stanislas
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge MA02138, USA.
Philos Psychol. 2008 Aug 1;21(4):491. doi: 10.1080/09515080802285354.
Humans possess two nonverbal systems capable of representing numbers, both limited in their representational power: the first one represents numbers in an approximate fashion, and the second one conveys information about small numbers only. Conception of exact large numbers has therefore been thought to arise from the manipulation of exact numerical symbols. Here, we focus on two fundamental properties of the exact numbers as prerequisites to the concept of exact numbers: the fact that all numbers can be generated by a successor function, and the fact that equality between numbers can be defined in an exact fashion. We discuss some recent findings assessing how speakers of Mundurucu (an Amazonian language), and young western children (3-4 years old) understand these fundamental properties of numbers.
人类拥有两种能够表示数字的非语言系统,但它们的表征能力都有限:第一种以近似方式表示数字,第二种仅传达关于小数目的信息。因此,精确大数字的概念被认为是由精确数字符号的操作产生的。在这里,我们关注精确数字的两个基本属性,它们是精确数字概念的先决条件:所有数字都可以由后继函数生成这一事实,以及数字之间的相等性可以以精确方式定义这一事实。我们讨论了一些最近的研究结果,这些结果评估了蒙杜鲁库语(一种亚马孙语言)使用者和西方幼儿(3至4岁)如何理解数字的这些基本属性。