Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children learn number words slowly, acquiring exactmeanings for their first words in sequence, with many monthsin between words. The long delays are surprising in light ofevidence that infants can discriminate, e.g., sets of 2 from 3.Here, we test the hypothesis that, rather than facing aperceptual problem, children have difficulty identifyingnumber as the dimension of meaning encoded by an adjectivelike “three.” We trained children on an unknown number wordin the context of a proper noun (a giraffe named “Mr. 3” withthree spots), and found that 1- and 2-knowers were later betterat identifying the giraffe from a lineup, relative to children whohad heard the same giraffe described with an adjective (“withthree spots”). These results support the hypothesis thatidentifying number as a dimension of meaning, rather thanvisual discriminability or salience, is a bottleneck on earlynumber word learning.