Department of Linguistics and Languages will host a talk by Dr. Suzi Lima from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro & University of Toronto on April 5, 2017. This is part of the Cognitive Science of Language lecture series of the current academic year. A central question in the literature on the development of natural number concepts is the role of count lists in this process. In this talk, Dr. Suzi Lima will present her work on the comparison of two different theoretical perspectives on this question: Carey’s cultural construction hypothesis (count lists provide the requisite placeholder structure for children to infer the relative relations between number words and acquire numbers beyond the limits of parallel individuation) and Spelke’s language combinatorics hypothesis (the human combinatorial capacity enables children to learn higher number words as denoting set sizes composed of smaller ones (e.g., “five” is “three” and “two”).