Counting without end: A cross-linguistic exploration of infinity beliefs in English and Hindi learners

Recent studies (Cheung et al., 2017; Chu et al., 2020; Sullivan et al., 2023) argue that children may infer the existence of infinite magnitudes through experience with number words, which provide a system of rules for generating ever-larger numbers. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the development of children's infinity beliefs in two languages - English and Hindi - whose counting systems differ with respect to the transparency of their rules. In a study with 240 four- to eight-year-old children, we found that children who learn to count in English (n = 120) demonstrated both greater counting proficiency and better understanding of the successor relations between numbers relative to children who learn to count in Hindi (n = 120). We also found that children's infinity beliefs were associated with their mastery of the verbal count list, but the proportion of children who endorsed the belief that numbers are infinite did not differ across languages. We conclude that transparency of the linguistic structure of a counting system may be important for understanding the rules governing counting, but in contrast to previous studies, suggest that the direct relationship between these rules and beliefs about the boundless nature of number words may be weak. The implications of these findings and avenues for future research are discussed.