The construction of number concepts

This paper describes the development of number concepts from infancy to early childhood. The results of a diary study on a child's one-to-one correspondence activities from 12 to 38 months of age are presented. The diary study suggested that social activities, such as distributing objects to people, play a greater role in early numerical development than conservation-like activities, such as matching object sets. There also was evidence that early number concepts are highly context-dependent. Specifically, although this child represented and matched equivalent sets in a few highly constrained contexts, he could not do so in others. An alternative to the competence-performance distinction is developed for explaining such cross-task variability. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.