The Cradle of Culture and What Children Know About Writing and Numbers Before Being

by Tolchinsky,Liliana

• ISBN13: 9780805838435
• ISBN10: 0805838430
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Psychology Pres

Summary

This book provides a thrilling description of preliterate children's developing ideas about writing and numerals, and it illustrates well the many ways in which cultural artifacts influence the mind and vice versa. Remarkably, children treat writing and numerals as distinct even before they have received any formal training on the topic, and well before they learn how to use writing to represent messages and numerals to represent quantities. In this revolutionary new book, Liliana Tolchinsky argues that preliterate children's experiences with writing and numerals play an essential and previously unsuspected role in children's subsequent development. In this view, learning notations, such as writing is not just a matter of acquiring new instruments for communicating existing knowledge. Rather, there is a continual interaction between children's understanding of the features of a notational system and their understanding of the corresponding domain of knowledge. The acquisition of an alphabetic writing system transforms children's view of language, and the acquisition of a formal system of enumeration transforms children's understanding of numbers. Written in an engaging narrative style, and richly illustrated with historical examples, case studies, and charming descriptions of children's behavior, this book is aimed not only at cognitive scientists, but also at educators, parents, and anyone interested in how children develop in a cultural context.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Introduction What Children Know and We Have Already Forgotten About Writing and Numerals	xv
Defining a Domain of Knowledge	xvii
A Developmental Domain-Specific Perspective on Writing and Numerals	xxiii
A Constructivist Perspective on Writing and Numerals	xxv
Private and Public Aspects of Writing and Numbers	xxvii
Literate Adults' Ideas About the Development of Writing	xxviii
Outline of the Book	xxx
What Philosophers Say About Representational Means That May Help Us to Understand What Makes Writing and Numerals so Special	1	(20)
The Confines of Semiotics	5	(1)
External and Internal Representations	6	(3)
Aside on Two Examples to Clarify Different Types of Representation	9	(2)
Conditions of External Representations	11	(1)
Dimensions for Distinguishing Pictorial and Scriptorial Devices	12	(3)
The Notion of Notation	15	(6)
Conditions Met by Notational Elements	16	(3)
Context Sensitivity Revisited	19	(2)
What Historians Say About the Origin and History of Writing and Numerals	21	(32)
Prototypical Accounts of the History of Writing	26	(2)
Aside on The Projection Principle	28	(1)
The Seed(s) of Writing	29	(3)
Aside on the Metalinguistic Reflection and Writing	32	(2)
Principles in Historical Notation of Number	34	(4)
The Grouping Principle	35	(2)
Operational Principles	37	(1)
The Positional Principle	37	(1)
Notational Principles and Notational Forms	38	(2)
The Use of Notational Elements for Representing Absence	39	(1)
Some Conclusions About the Historical Principles of Number Notation	40	(1)
Principles in the History of Writing	41	(4)
The Case of Proper Names	42	(2)
The Case of Multilingual Cuneiform	44	(1)
Aside on Types of Language	45	(5)
The Case of the Phoenician Letters	48	(2)
The Case of Romance Latin	50	(1)
Some Conclusions From the Historical Case Analyses	50	(3)
What Children Know About Writing Before Being Formally Taught to Write	53	(44)
The Child's Path to Alphabetic Writing	55	(34)
Writing to Write	56	(6)
Writing Becomes Formally Constrained	62	(1)
Constraints on Legibility	62	(3)
Constraints on ``Writability''	65	(4)
Writing Becomes Communicative	69	(2)
Links Between Reading and Writing	71	(3)
Writing Becomes Regulated by Letter-to-Sound Correspondences	74	(2)
The Syllabic Hypothesis	76	(2)
Writing Becomes Language Specific	78	(6)
The Alphabetic Principle	84	(5)
The Development of Early Writing and Invented Spelling	89	(3)
The Development of Early Writing and Sociocultural Approaches to Literacy	92	(2)
Writing as a Source of Knowledge	94	(3)
What Children Know About Numerals Before Being Formally Taught and Immediately Afterward	97	(48)
Notional Cognition and Notational Cognition	98	(5)
Numerical Notions Before Notations	103	(25)
Cognition of Environmental Notations	109	(6)
Interpreting and Relating Digital and Analogical Representations	115	(2)
Creating Graphic Representations of Quantity	117	(4)
Inventing Numerical Notations	121	(4)
Understanding Combinations of Numerals	125	(3)
Children's Path to the Written System of Numeration	128	(6)
Criterion 1: The Number of Numerals is a Good Indicator of Magnitude	129	(1)
Criterion 2: The Position of Numerals is Also Important: The One Coming First Wins	130	(1)
Criterion 3: Round Numbers Receive a Privileged Treatment	131	(2)
Criterion 4: Conflict Between Magnitude and Number of Numerals	133	(1)
Aside on Spoken and Written Numeration	134	(5)
The Representation of Absence and the Use of Zero	137	(2)
Numerals as a Source of Knowledge	139	(6)
What Children Know About the Relations Between Writing and Number Notation	145	(39)
Similarities and Differences Between Alphabetic Writing and Numerals	147	(4)
The Child's View of Writing and Numerals Before Schooling	151	(24)
Formal Differentiation Between Writing and Numerals	152	(5)
Functional Differentiation Between Writing and Numerals	157	(9)
Explicit Differentiation Between Writing and Numerals	166	(9)
Differentiation Without Schooling	175	(2)
Sources of Early Differentiation	177	(3)
So Where Does Early Differentiation Originate?	180	(1)
New Writing Spaces or Redefining Relations Between Notations	181	(3)
The Effect of Writing on Children and Grown-ups Once It Has Been Learned	184	(29)
Aside on Writing and Language	186	(2)
The Effects of Writing on Language	188	(3)
Phonological Awareness	188	(3)
In What Ways Did the Two Languages Differ?	191	(9)
Morphological Awareness	193	(1)
Judgments of Grammaticality	194	(2)
Conceptualization of Words	196	(4)
The Effect of Writing on Life	200	(13)
Valentin Jamerey-Duval: Acquiring Technology and the Prevailing Ideology	201	(2)
Writing in the Life of Domenicho Scandella: Incorporating Technology Into One's Own Ideology	203	(2)
Writing in the Life of Latifa: Writing as Alienation	205	(2)
Writing on Writing	207	(6)
Closing Reflections on Notational Systems, Boomerangs, and Circles	213	(14)
The Boomerang Effect on the Development of Writing and Numerals	215	(4)
The Boomerang Effect on Users' Ideas of the Domains of Knowledge Represented by Notations	219	(2)
The Boomerang Effect on the History of Notational Systems	221	(1)
The Boomerang Effect in the Relations Between Biology and Culture	222	(1)
Looking Forward and Appreciating What Has Been Learned	223	(4)
References	227	(14)
Glossary	241	(6)
Author Index	247	(6)
Subject Index	253