Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate young children`s nonsymbolic arithmetic ability according to task difficulty. The participants in this study comprised 43 2-year-old children and 48 4-year-old children recruited from 5 childcare centers located in Seoul, Korea. All tasks were composed of comparison, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tasks. In addition, each arithmetic task varied with the ratio of the two quantities; low level(1:2), middle level(2:3), high level(4:5). The results revealed that 2 & 4-year-old children could perform a large numerical range of nonsymbolic arithmetic tasks without influences from previously learned mathematics. This finding suggests that children have a degree of numerical capacity prior to symbolic mathematics instruction. Furthermore, children`s performance on nonsymbolic arithmetic tasks indicated the ratio signature of large approximate numerical representation. This result implies that large approximate numerical representation can be used in arithmetical manipulations.
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