Toddlers' Spontaneous Attention to Number and Verbal Number Quantification

86 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.The dissertation reports on two studies. The first study systematically examined whether and how age, collection size, and heterogeneity of the objects affect toddlers' tendency to focus on number. Each of 37 participants between the ages of 2 and 4.25 years was shown 36 different collections of 2, 3, and 4 items that were homogeneous, semihomogeneous, or heterogeneous. Age, collection size, and collection make-up were found to have significant effects on children's tendency to attend to number, which is inconsistent with the nativists' hypothesis of an innate cardinal concept of three. The second study was conducted to further clarify this issue and to include data on children's verbal number performance. The results revealed that SAN with two and three was significantly correlated with a child's preferred verbal quantification strategy and with the child's ability to verbally label a collection without counting, respectively.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD