Piantadosi Steven T, Jara-Ettinger Julian, Gibson Edward
Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, USA.
Dev Sci. 2014 Jul;17(4):553-63. doi: 10.1111/desc.12078. Epub 2014 Apr 28.
We show that children in the Tsimane', a farming-foraging group in the Bolivian rain-forest, learn number words along a similar developmental trajectory to children from industrialized countries. Tsimane' children successively acquire the first three or four number words before fully learning how counting works. However, their learning is substantially delayed relative to children from the United States, Russia, and Japan. The presence of a similar developmental trajectory likely indicates that the incremental stages of numerical knowledge - but not their timing - reflect a fundamental property of number concept acquisition which is relatively independent of language, culture, age, and early education.
我们发现，生活在玻利维亚雨林从事农耕与觅食的齐曼内人部落中的儿童，学习数字单词的发展轨迹与工业化国家的儿童相似。齐曼内儿童在完全掌握计数方法之前，会依次学会最初的三四个数字单词。然而，相对于来自美国、俄罗斯和日本的儿童，他们的学习明显滞后。相似发展轨迹的存在可能表明，数字知识的渐进阶段——而非其发生时间——反映了数字概念习得的一种基本特性，这种特性相对独立于语言、文化、年龄和早期教育。
