Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children learn the meaning of number words by going througha systematic set of stages of knowledge that culminates in theirmastery of counting. Theoretical work has long suggested thatchildren’s acquisition of counting is not procedural, butsemantic: all counters understand that counting computescardinality. Yet, recent research has cast doubt on whetherearly counters truly understand the meaning of these words.Here we show that early counters also have an immatureunderstanding of how one-to-one correspondence between anordered list and a set of objects can be used to compute exactcardinality. Nonetheless, this understanding is improved whencues to quantity, such as size, are highlighted. Our results addto a growing body of work suggesting that counting is not afinal stage in children’s path to number, but a powerful toolthat they can use to build and strengthen their intuitions aboutcardinalities.