Learning the language of time: Children’s acquisition of duration words

• DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/5afc3
• Publication Date: 2018-07-02T06:44:21Z
• Authors: Katharine Tillman; David Barner
• Keywords: Time perception

Children use time words like minute and hour early in development, but takeyears to acquire their precise meanings. Here we investigate whetherchildren assign meaning these usages, if so, how. To do this,we test interpretation of seven words: second, minute, hour,day, week, month, year. We find that preschoolers infer the orderingsof (e.g., > minute), have little no knowledge theabsolute durations they encode. Knowledge absolute duration is learnedmuch later development – many years after children first start usingtime speech does not emerge until haveacquired formal definitions for words. conclude associatingwords with perception come naturally children,and intuitive meanings are instead rooted inrelative orderings, which may from speech.