Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It has been suggested that the way that number words are used mayplay an important role in the development of number concepts.However, little is currently known about the overall ways in whichnumber words are used in child-directed speech. To address this,we performed an analysis of how number words are used in theCHILDES database. We looked at four statistics: 1) lexicalfrequency, 2) contextual diversity, 3) word co-occurrence, and 4)distributional similarity, to see if these distributional statisticssuggest why some aspects of number acquisition are easy andothers are hard, and if these statistics are informative about specificdebates in number acquisition. We found that that are manyimportant differences in how small and large number words areused (such as differences in frequency, co-occurrence patterns, anddistributional similarity), differences that may play an role inshaping hypotheses about children’s acquisition of numberconcepts. Keywords: number representation, language acquisition,concept acquisition, statistical learning, corpus analyses