The main finding that three- and four-year-old children can make inferences relating numerosity and one-to-one correspondence information implicate more mathematical knowledge than Piaget attributed to young children. Their knowledge does not appear to be as closely tied to counting and other action schemas as other accounts of early numerical…

Young children's understanding of correspondences and numerical differences between disjoint sets was studied in three experiments. Findings appeared to restrict the theory that young children are limited to perceptually based forms of mathematical reasoning. (Author/MP)