Les capacités numériques préverbales et leur évolution

Abstract

Preverbal numerical abilities and their evolution. Many experiments have suggested that infants show preverbal numerical capacities. These data have led researchers to a debate about the nature of these capacities : is the numerical sensibility found with infants based on specific cognitive capacities or is it based on a global representation of objects ? According to the second approach, the representation of numerosity should only be of conceptual nature after the occurrence of language. However, experimental data have revealed that infants’ numerical capacities are independent of perceptive characteristics of objects (as physical identity or spatial localisation of objects). Moreover, they are not specific to visual objects and can also be applied to auditive entities or physical events. Thus, if preverbal numerical abilities are not based on the object itself, the language cannot represent a developmental drop between a previous stage of implicit representation of number, based on the object, and the final stage of conceptual representation of number. Infants and older children’s failures that can be stated in the literature could then reflect something else than a lack of numerical competence. As another alternative, we propose here to analyse these failures in terms of inhibition inefficiency, default which could hide the existence of true numerical capacities with young children.