The purpose of this study was to explore the role of language in the development of numeric understanding. Specifically, we compared English- and Japanese-speaking preschool children's performance on a perceptional task that examined their numeric understanding without relying on the children's linguistic understanding. Kouider and colleagues (2006) found that primarily English-speaking children can recognize singular and plural distinctions as early as 20-24 months of age. However, not all languages have the grammatical marker for singular vs. plural objects. For example, the Japanese language does not have a distinction between singular and plural words (Li et al., 2009). Due to this difference in grammatical systems in these two languages, we hypothesized that primarily Japanese speaking children would have a more difficult time distinguishing between plural and singular even in a perceptually oriented task. In the current study, we compared children's understanding of plurality and singularity in children ages 3 to 5 and collected data from 99 primarily Japanese speaking children and 133 primarily English-speaking children. Similar to previous research (e.g., Sarnecka et al., 2007) the results demonstrated that English-speaking children outperformed Japanese-speaking children at age 3 in the singular vs. plural matching task. Using the same task, however, Japanese 5-year-old children performed better than their American counterparts. These findings suggest a complex relationship between language and numeric understanding among preschool children.
