Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Infants form exact representations of small quantities (1 to 4) but only approximate representations of larger quantities. How do children acquire exact large-number concepts? We tested whether training showing how sets of 5 or 6 can be decomposed into smaller sets increases children's understanding of five and six. We compared compositional training, using expressions such as "I have five pets: three dogs and two cats" paired with visual displays of the subsets, to training that drew attention to each object in succession, as in counting ("I have five pets, here's one, and another, and another, and another, and another."). Children who did not know the trained number word at the outset performed significantly better at test in the compositional condition. Thus, children can leverage their knowledge of small numbers to build representations of larger numbers.