Developmental Changes in Number Personification by Elementary School Children.

ABSTRACT: Children often personify non-living objects, such as puppets and stars. This attribution is considered a healthy phenomenon, which can simulate social exchange and enhance children's understanding of social relationships. In this study, we considered that the tendency of children to engage in personification could potentially be observed in abstract entities, such as numbers. We hypothesized that children tend to attribute personalities to numbers, which diminishes during the course of development. By consulting the methodology to measure ordinal linguistic personification (OLP), which is a type of synesthesia, we quantified the frequency with which child and adult populations engage in number personification. Questionnaires were completed by 151 non-synesthetic children (9-12 years old) a

SUBMITTER: Matsuda E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6249874 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature