PT140 · S3 · Q13 Several three-year-olds who

This has the right gist but goes way too far with it. We don't know that these 3 year olds would have found it impossible to learn their phone numbers without the aid of songs. We only seem to know that songs aided them in learning their number. Maybe an exercise in which all the kids had to paint their phone numbers would have also done the trick.

This is lovably weak language. To support the idea that "X is not always sufficient for knowing Y", we only need one example in which someone knew X but didn't know Y. Can we say that these 3 year olds were, - familiar with the concept of their phone number but - didn't know the words used to express their phone number? No we can't. Because the words used to express a phone number are the names of digits ("eight-six-seven-five-three-zero-nine"), and "each child was familiar with the names of all the digits".

Just like (A), this has the right gist, but it's way too strongly worded. We know that songs, in this case, helped 3 year olds to remember their phone number. That doesn't give us much support for the extreme claim that mnemonics are better than any other method for memorizing numbers. This situation didn't involve a comparison between all possible methods for memorizing numbers.

This is lovably weak language. To support the idea that "Someone can do X without understanding Y", we only need one example in which someone can do X but doesn't understand Y. Can we say that these 3 year olds ... - can learn to count but - don't understand the meaning of numbers? No we can't. They had learned to count to ten, so we can say they can learn to count (at least somewhat). But we have no support for the idea that they don't understand the meaning of numbers. They might understand the meaning of "one" or "two". Memorizing a phone number isn't related to understanding the meaning of numbers. It's just related to remembering a sequence of numbers.