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Children's learning of number words in an indigenous farming‐foraging group
Author(s) -
Piantadosi Steven T.,
JaraEttinger Julian,
Gibson Edward
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.12078
Subject(s) - foraging , indigenous , psychology , trajectory , agriculture , language acquisition , developmental psychology , demography , ecology , mathematics education , sociology , biology , physics , astronomy
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.