You Can Teach Counting to Babies Much Before they Join Kindergarten

Babies are capable of
understanding and counting numbers much early in their life and not at the age
of four when they enter Kindergarten. A research done by John Hopkins
University team of cognitive scientists
discovered that babies who hear counting realize that counting indicates
quantity. The findings were reported in
the journal Developmental Science pointed out that babies may be years away
from understanding the exact meaning of number words yet recognise that
counting is about number. Lisa Feigenson, a cognitive
scientist at Johns Hopkins who specializes in the development of numeric
ability in children said, "Research like ours shows that babies actually
have a pretty sophisticated understanding of the world—they're already trying
to make sense of what adults around them are saying, and that includes this
domain of counting and numbers."
To find out, Feigenson and
first author Jenny Wang, a former graduate student at Johns Hopkins who is
slated to become an assistant professor at Rutgers University, worked with 14-
and 18-month-old infants. The babies watched as toys—little dogs or cars—were
hidden in a box that they couldn't see inside of but could reach into.
Sometimes the researchers
counted each toy aloud as they dropped them into the box, saying, "Look!
One, two, three, four! Four dogs!" Other times the researchers simply
dropped each toy into the box, saying, "This, this, this, and this—these
dogs."
Without counting, the babies
had a hard time remembering that the box held four things. They tended to
become distracted after the researchers pulled just one out—as if there was
nothing else to see. But when the toys were counted, the babies clearly
expected more than one to be pulled from the box. They didn't remember the
exact number but they did remember the approximate number.
"When we counted the toys
for the babies before we hid them, the babies were much better at remembering
how many toys there were," Wang said. "As a researcher these results
were really surprising. And our results are the first to show that very young
infants have a sense that when other people are counting it is tied to the rough
dimension of quantity in the world."
The team is now conducting
several follow-up studies to determine whether early counting practice leads to
later number skills and if English-speaking babies react to counting in a
foreign language.
Source: John Hopkins University
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