A FEATURAL ANALYSIS OF PRESCHOOLERS COUNTING KNOWLEDGE

Preschoolers clearly are adept in executing the standard correct counting procedure. Whether they know the principles underlying the procedure is less clear, however. In the present experiments, preschoolers'' knowledge of counting principles was investigated by examining their ability to discriminate between features that are essential for correct counting and features that are typically present but unessential. The standard counting procedure was analyzed into 1 essential feature, word/object correspondence, and 4 optional features: counting adjacent objects consecutively, pointing once to each object, starting at an end of a row and proceeding in a left to right direction. The experimenter asked 3- to 5-yr-olds to judge acceptable or unacceptable a puppet''s counting that either violated the essential feature, that violated 1 or more unessential features, or that conformed to the standard correct procedure. Children who knew the word/object correspondence principle presumably would reject counts that violated it more often than counts that conformed to it. Each child''s skill in counting rows of objects also was assessed. Skill in executing the standard counting procedure was found to precede knowledge of the underlying principle. Four- and 5-yr-olds knew that word/object correspondence was essential, although a high precentage of them did not know that other typical features were unessential. An analysis of probable environmental input and of the feature''s utility in separating already-counted from to-be-counted objects was proposed to account for the relative probabilities that children knew that each of the 5 features of standard counting was essential or optional.