And what are these symbols? Into the language of counting Marks representing a numeric symbol are found in almost all known cultures Young children encounter these symbols on many places and begin to c what they repr resent In many cultures chi are taught to chant the number sequence often before they have any clear understanding of what it is they are saying Parents and carers count as children climb up the stairs, or as a child is tossed in the ar or as the spoon approaches the open mouth The question arises as ro how the child knows that the ords one, two, three and so on are words specifically relaung to counting. Gelman 1990) suggests that very young children keep the sct of count words separate from their ser of labels. This, again, omplicated. Let us take the example of cars, The child when acquiring speech, learns to attach the label"car to vehicles with wheels They may be blue or green big or small, but they share some key features. But when the child is presented with four cars and asked to count them the child will not get far sim ply chanting car, car, car, car The child needs different labels to do this and these are the labels the language uses for counting in English, for example, one, two, three four symbols they will sometimes invent their own When children come to exploring studies of this was symbols ro represent a number of objects One of the most famous each filled with a carried out by Bialystok(1991) who presented children with boxes, on the lid different number of small objects. She asked the children to stick something to lift of each box so that they would know how many were in the box without having the lid. Children produced either traditional number symbols or analogical representa- tions(erg six dots or six lines or drawings), Analogical notations were less help to the children when it came to recognising and decoding cheir meaning Shown below ure four small drawings made by a child to illustrate the four objects In one box The child had more difficulty in remembering the number and had to count the drawings each time she was perfectly able to recognise the symbol i and to state immediately that there were four objects on che box with this on the lid Karmiloff Smith(1992) that this occurs later in development than more simple symbol suggests memory or pictorial representation
You will realise that numerals are only a small part of coming to understand the world of mathematics, which is in itself an abstract and largely symbolic world. We will talk more about this in the chapter on the child as investigator.