My younger son, now two and a half, can count at least into the teens before things get muddled. But when you ask him to count something, there are two alternatives. Sometimes he'll do bijective enumeration, pointing to each item in turn and saying the next number, at the end announcing the correct total. Other times he will just count -- that is, recite numbers until he decides to stop, sometimes including pointing at things, perhaps multiple times. But when he "just counts", I can say "Can you count them *carefully*?" -- and he'll do bijective enumeration every time. --Michael On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Gareth McCaughan < gareth.mccaughan@pobox.com> wrote:
On Thursday 15 January 2009, Dan Asimov wrote:
[me:]
My daughter recently went 1,2,3,...,13,14,16,16,16,16,16,... . I assume some 4-bit counter overflowed and scrobbled a linked-list pointer, or something.
[Dan:]
There's a vignette of a small child counting birds on a wire: "1, 4, 3, 9, 12, 11, 2. That's funny, it looks like more than 2."
Ha. (But my daughter could count well beyond 2 before she had any inkling of notions like "looks like more than 2"; for some time she'd say "2!" when asked how many of anything there were (if more than one).
-- g
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