RELATIONAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL ASPECTS OF EARLY NUMBER DEVELOPMENT

Two experiments examined the role of representations of numerosity in children's reasoning about relations between two quantities. In the fi rst experiment, 3- and 4-year-old children were able to solve matching -to-sample problems on the basis of both the numerosity of a focal set (number matches) and the correspondence relation between two sets (re lational matches); but in a conflict condition, the younger children u sed only the relational information. In the second experiment, both th e 3- and the 4-year-olds showed very high levels of success in inferri ng numerical equivalence from commutativity relations between two pair s of sets. Children were successful even when one of the sets in each pair was covered, so that children could not directly enumerate the qu antities to be compared. Both findings support the notion that relatio nal reasoning originates independently of processes for representing n umerosity.