Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California at Irvine , Irvine, CA, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Oct 9;5:1132. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01132. eCollection 2014.
This mini-review focuses on the question of how the grammatical number system of a child's language may help the child learn the meanings of cardinal number words (e.g., "one" and "two"). Evidence from young children learning English, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Slovenian, or Saudi Arabic suggests that trajectories of number-word learning differ for children learning different languages. Children learning English, which distinguishes between singular and plural, seem to learn the meaning of the cardinal number "one" earlier than children learning Japanese or Mandarin, which have very little singular/plural marking. Similarly, children whose languages have a singular/dual/plural system (Slovenian and Saudi Arabic) learn the meaning of "two" earlier than English-speaking children. This relation between grammatical and cardinal number may shed light on how humans acquire cardinal-number concepts. There is an ongoing debate about whether mental symbols for small cardinalities (concepts for "oneness," "twoness," etc.) are innate or learned. Although an effect of grammatical number on number-word learning does not rule out nativist accounts, it seems more consistent with constructivist accounts, which portray the number-learning process as one that requires significant conceptual change.
这篇迷你综述聚焦于儿童语言的语法数系统如何帮助儿童学习基数词（如“一”和“二”）的含义这一问题。来自于学习英语、俄语、日语、汉语普通话、斯洛文尼亚语或沙特阿拉伯语的幼儿的证据表明，学习不同语言的儿童的数字词学习轨迹有所不同。学习英语的儿童（英语区分单数和复数）似乎比学习日语或汉语普通话的儿童更早地学习基数词“一”的含义，因为后两种语言的单数/复数标记非常少。类似地，其语言具有单数/双数/复数系统的儿童（斯洛文尼亚语和沙特阿拉伯语）比讲英语的儿童更早地学习“二”的含义。语法数和基数之间的这种关系可能有助于揭示人类如何获得基数概念。关于小基数的心理符号（“一”、“二”等概念）是先天的还是后天习得的，一直存在争议。尽管语法数对数字词学习的影响并不能排除先天论解释，但它似乎更符合建构主义解释，后者将数字学习过程描述为需要重大概念转变的过程。
