Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

hildren acquire exact meanings for number words in distinctstages. First, they learn one, then two, and then three andsometimes four. Finally, children learn to apply the countingprocedure to their entire count list. Although these stages areubiquitous and well documented, the foundation of thesemeanings remains highly contested. Here we ask whetherchildren assign preliminary meanings to number words beforelearning their exact meanings by examining their responses onthe Give-a-Number task to numbers for which they do not yethave exact meanings. While several research groups haveapproached this question before, we argue that because thesedata do not usually conform to a normal distribution, typicalmethods of analysis likely underestimate their knowledge.Using non-parametric analyses, we show that children acquirenon-exact meanings for small number words like one, two,three, four and possibly for higher numbers well before theyacquire the exact meanings.