Abstract

MIRANDA ALVAREZ, Fabiola; ESPINOSA RODRIGUEZ, Julio; LOPEZ RODRIGUEZ, Florente  and  ROMERO SANCHEZ, Patricia. How do They Count? Cardinality in Preschool Children. Acta de investigación psicol [online]. 2018, vol.8, n.3, pp.25-35. ISSN 2007-4719.  https://doi.org/10.22201/fpsi.20074719e.2018.3.03.

The counting principles proposed by Gelman and Gallistel (1978): stable order, biunivocal correspondence and cardinality, have been widely studied to account for the count. However, evidence on cardinality ownership is not always assessed by a valid procedure, and little is known about the transition in counting skills from an early age. This study was designed to evaluate the performance of infants in different counting tasks as a function of age, as well as to compare the perfor mance in cardinality tasks How many? and Give N when the requirement of simpler counting levels is satisfied. Participants were 48 children between 30 and 54 months of age, selected from School Centers in Mexico City. All of the participants were exposed to tasks of a stable order, and one-to-one correspondence as a requisite for the application of the cardinality tasks “How many?” and “Give N” as a test phase of the cardinality property. The results showed a greater execution in How many? in children after 36 months, as well as a positive linear relationship between the execution of tasks and age, with the level of adjustment in the model that includes the performance in Dame N as the predicted variable being higher. Data are discussed according to the pertinence of the different tasks in the measurement of cardinality and it is stated that the development of cardinal abilities does not necessarily part from the domain of simpler properties of counting as the only condition.

Keywords : Counting; Development; Stable order; One-to-one correspondence; Children.