Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Numerous studies have shown that number word learning is a protracted process. One challenge facing children learning the meaning of number word such as “one”, “two”, or “three” is that number words refer to a property of a set and not to individual objects. In this study, we focused on a sample of children who have not learned the meaning of small number words such as “two” and “three” and tested whether children could learn number words from examples of sets that help them focus on set size. Specifically, the experimental training condition included examples that highlight a common relational structure between sets through varying object properties in the sets (e.g., three yellow stars and three red hearts are both “three”), whereas the control condition did not vary object properties(e.g., two sets of three yellow stars with different spatial arrangement). We trained two- and three-knowers (N = 65) on the next number (i.e., three or four) and assessed their learning with a Two-Alternative-Forced-Choice task and Give-a-Number task. Overall, we found weak effects of training. We discuss our findings in the broader literature on number word learning and explore the possibility of analogical reasoning as a mechanism of number word learning.