Language skills and mathematical competencies are argued to influence each other during development. While a relation between the development of vocabulary size and mathematical skills is already documented in the literature, this study further examines how children’s ability to map a novel word to an unknown object as well as their ability to retain this word from memory may be related to their knowledge of number words. Twenty-five children were tested longitudinally (at 30 and at 36 months of age) using an eye-tracking-based fast mapping task, the Give-a-Number task, and standardized measures of vocabulary. The results reveal that children’s ability to create and retain a mental representation of a novel word was related to number knowledge at 30 months, but not at 36 months while vocabulary size correlated with number knowledge only at 36 months. These results show that even specific mapping processes are initially related to the acquisition of number words and they speak for a parallelism between the development of lexical and number-concept knowledge despite their semantic and syntactic differences.

语言技能和数学能力被认为在发展过程中会相互影响。虽然词汇量的发展与数学技能之间的关系已经在文献中有所记载，但本研究进一步检验了儿童将新词映射到未知物体的能力以及他们从记忆中保留这个词的能力可能与他们对数词的了解。使用基于眼动追踪的快速映射任务、给出数字任务和标准化的词汇量度对 25 名儿童进行了纵向测试（分别在 30 个月和 36 个月大）。结果表明，儿童在 30 个月时创造和保持对新词的心理表征的能力与数字知识有关，但不是在 36 个月时，而词汇量大小仅在 36 个月时与数字知识相关。这些结果表明，即使是特定的映射过程最初也与数字词的获得有关，尽管它们在语义和句法上存在差异，但它们表明词汇和数字概念知识的发展之间存在并行性。