Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children map symbolic number words to continuousand noisy perceptual magnitudes? We explore how 5- to 12-year-olds attach novel units to number, length, and area byexamining whether verbal estimation performance is primarilypredicted by access to number words, the precision ofchildren’s underlying perceptual systems, or a more generalprocess in structurally aligning number words with perceptualmagnitudes. We find that from age five onward, children canreadily form novel mappings between number words andperceptual magnitudes, including dimensions they have noexperience estimating in (e.g., length, area), and even whenfaced with completely novel units (e.g., mapping a collectionof three dots to “one” unit for number). Additionally,estimation performance was poorly predicted by the noise intheir underlying perceptual magnitudes and number wordaccess. Instead, we show that individual differences inchildren’s abilities to translate continuous perceptual signalsinto discrete categories underlie verbal estimationperformance.