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Children use one-to-one correspondence to establish equality after learning tocount

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Abstract

Humans make frequent and powerful use of external symbolsto express number exactly, leading some to question whetherexact number concepts are only available through the acqui-sition of symbolic number systems. Although prior work hasaddressed this longstanding debate on the relationship betweenlanguage and thought in innumerate populations and semi-numerate children, it has frequently produced conflicting re-sults, leaving the origin of exact number concepts unclear.Here, we return to this question by replicating methods pre-viously used to assess exact number knowledge in innumer-ate groups, such as the Pirah ̃a, with a large sample of semi-numerate US toddlers. We replicate previous findings fromboth innumerate cultures and developmental studies showingthat numeracy is linked to the concept of exact number. How-ever, we also find evidence that this knowledge is surprisinglyfragile even amongst numerate children, suggesting that nu-meracy alone does not guarantee a full understanding of exact-ness.

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