Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans can encode number both using non-verbal and verbal systems of representation. Here, we investigated the rela-tionship between 2- and 3-year-old childrens (N=122) understanding of number words and their ability to compare setsof small sizes (e.g., 2 vs 3) to test whether the acuity of small number representations changes as a function of numberword comprehension. Childrens comprehension of number words was measured using Wynns (1990) Give-Number task,while small number discrimination was measured using a computerized adaptation of Feigenson and Careys (2005) crawl-ing preference paradigm. We found that children were able to compare small sets within and beyond the small numberrange, independent of how objects are presented (i.e., simultaneously vs sequential). We also found no relation betweenthis ability and children’s comprehension of number words (i.e., knower-level), which argues against the hypothesis thatnon-verbal number acuity is related to the acquisition of verbal labels for exact number.