Representation of numerical and non-numerical order in children.
The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet (i.e., letter sequence) and the calendar year (i.e., month sequence). The representation of non-numerical order showed the same developmental pattern previously observed for numerical representation, with a logarithmic mapping in the youngest children and a shift to linear mapping in older children. Although the individual ability to position non-numerical items was related to the child's knowledge of the sequence, a significant amount of unique variance was explained by her type of number-line representation. These results suggest that the child's conception of numerical order is generalized to non-numerical sequences and that the concept of linearity is acquired in the numerical domain first and progressively extended to all ordinal sequences.
Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Padova, Italy.
Ilaria
I
Berteletti
Daniela
D
Lucangeli
Marco
M
Zorzi
D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008433:Mathematics; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*