2018 Friday Poster 6753

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

The acquisition of cardinal and ordinal numbers in Cantonese
M. Lei

The acquisition of ordinal numbers is built upon cardinal knowledge (Fuson and Hall 1983; Wiese 2007), but has to be differentiated from the concept of cardinality in that ordinals refer not to the numerosity of a set but a singular individual (the Ordinality Principle) ranked in a specific position in a sequence (the Order-Relevance Principle) (Wiese 2003). Only a few studies have examined ordinal acquisition (Fisher and Beckey 1990 on English; Miller et al. 2000 on English and Chinese; Colomé and Noël 2012 on French; Trabandt et al. 2015 on German; Meyer, Barbiers, and Weerman 2017 on Dutch). Chinese six- to ten-year-olds, as reported in Miller et al. (2000), performed at ceiling in their comprehension of ordinals, though how their early knowledge of ordinality develops remains to be ascertained.

The present study investigates Cantonese-speaking preschoolers’ acquisition of cardinals and ordinals by comparing their cardinal and ordinal concepts using the same “Give X” comprehension task (Wynn 1992). In Cantonese as in Mandarin Chinese, ordinal numbers are formed by adding the prefix dai6 (or in Mandarin) to a cardinal number like jat1 ‘one’ to mean ‘first’. In spite of a morphologically transparent and regular ordinal system, the lack of singular-plural distinction in Cantonese may pose problems to children as they cannot rely on number marking as a signal of singularity for the ordinals. We tested 65 Cantonese-speaking children (age range: 3;0-6;2), divided into three age groups: 3-year-olds (N=28), 4-year-olds (N=18), and 5-year-olds (N-19), on five cardinal numbers jat1 ‘one’, loeng5 ‘two’, saam1 ‘three’, sei3 ‘four’, and baat3 ‘eight’, and the corresponding ordinals dai6-jat1 ‘first’, dai6-ji6 ‘second’, dai6-saam1 ‘third’, dai6-sei3 ‘fourth’, and dai6-baat3 ‘eighth’ embedded in test sentences as (1-2), with two trials on each cardinal/ordinal presented in a pseudo-randomized order.

Our results show that Cantonese-speaking children exhibited the same “cardinal advantage” as previously reported. They acquired the cardinal number ‘one’ virtually perfectly at the age of three, ‘two’ through ‘four’ at age four, and ‘eight’ at five (Table 1). The corresponding ordinals were acquired much later, with ‘first’ at age four, and ‘second’ through ‘four’ at age five (Table 2). The overall correct rates of the ordinals were higher than previously reported on languages having a morphologically less transparent and regular ordinal system, as in English (Fisher and Beckey 1990) and French (Colomé and Noël 2012), suggesting that the extent of morphological transparency and regularity of a language’s ordinal system does play an important role in the development of ordinal concepts. Over half of children’s ordinal errors involved giving multiple items (Table 3), which is in striking difference from the Dutch’s error pattern where only two children gave multiple items each on two of the ordinal trials (Meyer, Barbiers, and Weerman 2017). As number marking is available in Dutch but not in Cantonese, it can guide Dutch children in recognizing the singularity requirement of the ordinals during the early stages of development. Taken together, our study reveals how language-specific properties affect children’s acquisition of the numerical concepts of cardinality and ordinality.

References

Colomé, Àngels, and Marie-Pascale Noël. 2012. “One First? Acquisition of the Cardinal and Ordinal Uses of Numbers in Preschoolers.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 113 (2): 233-247. Fischer, Florence E., and Robert D. Beckey. 1990. Beginning Kindergartners’ Perception of Number. Perceptual and Motor Skills 70: 301-314.

Fuson, Karen C., and James W. Hall 1983. The Acquisition of Early Number Word Meanings: A Conceptual Analysis and Review. In The Development of Mathematical Thinking, edited by Herbert P. Ginsburg, 49-107. New York: Academic Press.

Meyer, Caitlin, Sjef Barbiers, and Fred Weerman. 2017. “Ordinals Are Not as Easy as One, Two, Three: The Acquisition of Cardinals and Ordinals in Dutch.” Language Acquisition: 0-26. doi:10.1080/10489223.2017.1391266.

Miller, Kevin F., Susan M. Major, Hua Shu, and Houcan Zhang. 2000. “Ordinal Knowledge: Number Names and Number Concepts in Chinese and English.” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 54 (2): 129-139.

Trabandt, Corinna, Alexander Thiel, Emanuela Sanfelici, and Petra Schulz. 2015. “On the Acquisition of Ordinal Numbers in German.” In Proceedings of GALA 2013, edited by Esther Ruigendijk and Cornelia Hamann, 521-532. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Scholar Publishing.

Wiese, Heike. 2003. Numbers, Language, and the Human Mind. Cambridge University Press.

Wiese, Heike. 2007. “The Co-Evolution of Number Concepts and Counting Words.” Lingua 117 (5): 758-772.