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Linguistic computation & the illusion of conceptual change in number word learning| old_uid | 11956 |
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| title | Linguistic computation & the illusion of conceptual change in number word learning |
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| start_date | 2012/12/17 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | In this talk I address the problem of conceptual change in the domain
of number. My suggestion, on analogy to the birth of formal semantics
in the 1960's, is that characterizing the semantics of early numerical
concepts seems impossible if pragmatics is ignored, since children's
early numerical representations appear to be incommensurable with
their later knowledge of number. I argue that this incommensurability
is likely an illusion, however, and that when pragmatic inference is
accounted for, number word meanings can be explained by existing
representational resources that children use to acquire non-exact
quantifiers. To make this case, I examine two candidate conceptual
changes. First, I ask whether exactness is unique to number words, and
conclude that it is not, but falls out from non-exact lexical meanings
shared with quantifiers, plus Gricean quantity implicature. To make
this case, I will review evidence that young children can compute
sophisticated conversational implicatures, and that behaviors which
appear to support true conceptual change are in fact explained by
pragmatic inference. Second, I ask whether learning to use counting to
label sets involves a conceptual change, and argue that it does not.
Instead, learning to count is purely procedural in nature, though it
lays the groundwork for learning the inferential roles of number
words, and thus for acquiring mathematical knowledge. |
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| responsibles | Rämä, Izard |
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