Children use time words like “seconds” and “hours” long before they know what they mean

Resaerch Digest:

For adults, let alone children, time is a tricky concept to comprehend. In our culture, we carve it up into somewhat arbitrary chunks and attribute words to those durations: 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 of those in an hour and so on. We also have a sense of what these durations feel like. Children start using these time-related words at around the age of two or three years, even though they won’t master clocks until eight or nine. This raises the question – what do young children really understand about duration words?

Katharine Tillman and David Barner began by asking dozens of three- to six-year-olds to compare several pairs of durations (e.g. Farmer Brown jumped for a minute. Captain Blue jumped for an hour. Who jumped more?). As well as minutes and hours, other durations used were seconds, days, weeks, months and years. This test showed that by age four, the children were tending to get more of these questions right than would be expected if they were just guessing. With increasing age, the children got better at the task. In other words, from age four and up, children have a sense of the rank order of different duration terms.

What young children don’t have, according to the findings from further experiments, is a sense of the actual lengths of time that these terms refer to. When the comparison test was repeated, but with different amounts of each duration, the children were flummoxed. Take, for example, the question “Farmer Brown jumped for three minutes. Captain Brown jumped for two hours. Who jumped more?”As adults, we aren’t thrown by the minutes outnumbering the hours by three to two, because we know that an hour is 60 times longer than a minute, and that an hour feels much longer than minute. However, even five-year-olds, who know well the principle that an hour is longer than a minute, were thrown by these kinds of comparisons. This suggests they don’t yet have a very good understanding of the formal definitions of duration words, nor what the different durations feel like.