A refined description of initial symbolic number acquisition

Abstract

The Give a Number (GaN) task is used to characterize the initial acquisition of symbolic numbers. Recent observations may imply that the assumptions of the original description about the development of initial symbolic number acquisition are inaccurate. First, there may be children who know numbers larger than 4 and yet do not know all the numbers in their counting list. Second, knowledge of these first numbers may not be all or nothing but may, instead, be a more gradual knowledge. Here, a modified version of the GaN task is used to directly investigate these two properties of the development. By measuring three- and four-year-old children, it was found that there are large-number-subset-knowers (LNS-knowers), and that the knowledge of numbers around the edge of children’s known number range is not all or nothing. These results suggest that a modified version of the GaN task is more suitable to capture this more detailed pattern of numerical development: Numbers larger than 5 should also be measured, and, instead of the titration method, all numbers of interest should be used. Because some subset-knowers may know numbers beyond 4, these results may also challenge the Object Tracking System (OTS) account of initial symbolic number learning.