AN OPERATIONAL DETERMINATION OF THE MEANING OF QUANTITATIVE WORDS WITH PRESCHOOL CHILDREN IN THE PRESENT GENERATION

Preschool children of four years, five years and six years of age were tested in order to see how such young children understand the meaning of quantitative words. The method used is simple. It only requires each child to take out "many" or "a few" etc. beads (which are 1.5cm in diameter) from a container and put them on a tray. This method is significant in that it operationally determines the meaning of a word through action. Because of this simple procedure it was available to preschool children. Stimulus words selected for this study were "very many", "many", "a few" and "a very few". The present authors carried out a study of the same sort thirty years ago. The purpose of this study, thus, is to determine operationally the meaning of quantitative words with preschool children in the present generation, and to compare the results obtained here with those of the same study which was carried out three decades age, making clear the descrepancies between younger children of two generations in the interpretation of the meaning. And this article is mostly concerned with the analysis of results obtained from the present subjects. It was pointed out that scores (which are equal to the actual number taken) of "very many" and "many" were, as expected from the earlier study, very low as compared with the background number. Scores for these two words, however, tended to increase with age. Scores for "a few" and "a very few" were naturally very low. Five- and six-year olds could understand an adverb "very". For four-year olds, however, "very" is weak in meaning, and, in fact, some of them reversed two words: "a very few" > "a few". There were also a few children who interpreted these two words as "a very few" = "a few". In general, the difference between the lowest and the highest scores (that is, the score for "a very few" and the score for "very many") becomes greater with age. The present authors take the view that differentiation was found here. In any age group, the mean scores for four stimulus words increased with the increment of background number, but the scores did not double and treble in spite of the double and the treble increments in the background number