The effect of maternal support for counting and cardinal understanding in pre-school children

The effect of maternal support on the development of counting and cardinality was examined by observing 18 mother-child dyads engaged in two procedurally similar; but conceptually different tasks in a longitudinal design consisting of three phases (32, 38 and 44 months). At 32 and 38 months of age in both the supported and a similar unsupported condition the children were more successful in the count task than in the give 'x' task, which requires knowledge of the relationship between counting and cardinality. Observations of mother-child inter-actions found that whilst maternal support for the count word sequence was similar in the two tasks the way mothers focused their child's attention on the objects in the set differed between the tasks. It is argued that social biases as well as cognitive ones constrain the development of cardinal understanding.