Abstract

Three-and 4-year-old children's knowledge of counting and cardinality was tested in three experiments. Experiment 1 investigated children's knowledge of counting. Without asking to count experimenter asked the children "How many candies are there?". Three-year-old children responded correctly only at the smaller set size(1-3), but 4-year-old children responded correctly both the smaller and larger set sizes. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that 3-year-old children do not understand the counting principle, but. 4-year-old children do. Experiment 2 examined whether children understand that the last word used in a count represents the numerosity(cardinality principle). The results revealed that 3-year-old children do not understand the cardinality principle but 4-year-old children do. Experiment 3 explored the cardinality principle using three different tasks. Three different cardinality questions - "How many candies are here?" "Are there X candies here?" " Please give me X candies" - were used. For 4-year-old children's performance across the three tasks indicates that 4-year-old children understand the cardinality principle, but the 3-year-olds do not. These results do not support the principle before theory that young children initially understand the principle of cardinality(Gelman & Baillargeon, 1983; Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Gelman & Meck, 1983). Rather the results supports the principle after theory(Fuson & Hall, 1983; Fuson et al., 1985).