The linguistic roots of multiplication
It is a well-established fact, confirmed by various experiments, that preschoolers, human infants, and even non-human primates can perform intuitive addition and subtraction. Much less evidence has been put forth testifying that children are capable of multiplicative operations on sets before receiving formal training. What makes evidence of intuitive multiplication hard to obtain is that in the visual and auditive domains multiplication is usually indistinguishable from repeated addition. Our talk will claim that multiplication operations are routinely performed by children prior to schooling; they are encoded by syntactic means in such doubly quantified sentences as the Hungarian Három maci is két autóval játszik ’Three teddy bears (each) are playing with two cars’, and their English equivalents (cf. Musolino 2009). We will report on three experiments testing Hungarian preschoolers’ strategies of interpreting such sentences, and will show that, given certain syntactic and pragmatic clues, children interpret the two numerically modified expressions as a multiplier and a multiplicand, and also compute the product of multiplication, presumably relying on their approximate number system.
