Abstract：
The role of grammar in numerical development, and particularly the role of grammatical number inflection, has already been well-documented in toddlerhood. It is unclear, however, whether the influence of grammatical language structure further extends to more complex later stages of numerical development. Here, we addressed this question by exploiting differences between Polish, which has a complex grammatical number paradigm, leading to a partially inconsistent mapping between numerical quantities and grammatical number, and German, which has a comparatively easy verbal paradigm: 151 Polish-speaking and 123 German-speaking kindergarten children were tested using a symbolic numerical comparison task. Additionally, counting skills (Give-a-Number and count-list), and mapping between non-symbolic (dot sets) and symbolic representations of numbers, as well as working memory (Corsi blocks and Digit span) were assessed. Based on the Give-a-Number and mapping tasks, the children were divided into subset-knowers, CP-knowers-non-mappers, and CP-knowers-mappers. Linguistic background was related to performance in several ways: Polish-speaking children expectedly progressed to the CP-knowers stage later than German children, despite comparable non-numerical capabilities, and even after this stage was achieved, they fared worse in the numerical comparison task. There were also meaningful differences in spatial-numerical mapping between the Polish and German groups. Our findings are in line with the theory that grammatical number paradigms influence. the development of representations and processing of numbers, not only at the stage of acquiring the meaning of the first number-words but at later stages as well, when dealing with symbolic numbers.
摘要：
语法在数值发展中的作用，尤其是语法数字变形的作用，在幼儿时期已经有据可查了。不清楚,然而,语法语言结构的影响是否进一步扩展到更复杂的数字发展的后期阶段。这里,我们通过利用波兰人之间的差异来解决这个问题，具有复杂的语法数字范式，导致数字量和语法数之间的部分不一致的映射，德语,它具有相对简单的语言范式：使用象征性的数字比较任务对151名讲波兰语的幼儿园儿童和123名讲德语的幼儿园儿童进行了测试。此外,计数技能(给出数字和计数列表)，以及数字的非符号（点集）和符号表示之间的映射，以及工作记忆（Corsi块和数字跨度）进行了评估。基于“赋予数字”和“映射”任务，孩子们被分为子集知识者，CP-knowers-non-mappers,和CP-knowers-mappers。语言背景在几个方面与表现有关：讲波兰语的儿童比德国儿童更晚地发展到CP-knowers阶段，尽管具有可比的非数值能力，即使在达到这个阶段之后，他们在数字比较任务中表现更差。波兰和德国群体之间的空间数字映射也存在有意义的差异。我们的发现符合语法数字范式影响的理论。数字表示的发展和处理，不仅在获取第一个数字词的含义的阶段，而且在稍后的阶段，在处理符号数字时。
