Gelman And Gallistel 1978 Summary

Introduction
Gelman and Gallistel (1978) proposed that children aged 3-4 have implicit understanding of five counting principles. They can maintain stable order, one-to-one correspondence, understand order irrelevance, cardinality and abstraction (same rules, whatever is counted). This is important as children of that age are still in the preschool period. It could mean that children learn about the concept of numbers through interactions with the environment before being introduced to any formal instructions that are taught in school. It may also be because numerical knowledge is an innate and is simply improved during their stay at school. However, some research e.g. Baroody (1984) could not replicate Gelman and Gallistel (1978)’s findings
Their reasoning for that support came from the concept of language. They argued that very young children can find errors in the spoken language that violate linguistic rules (Clark, & Clark, 1977). Thus, there is a high probability that the same applies for the number concept and that preschool children will be able to detect the errors in counting. They conducted three counting experiments with 3 to 5 years old children. The error detection task was used in their study where children observed puppet’s counting. They were shown objects of different colours placed in the row and asked to help the puppet with his learning. They were asked to let him know whether he is wrong or right after he finished. In the first experiment the focus lied on one-to-one principle when the puppet skipped [e.g., 1,3,4,5] or double counted [e.g., 1,2,3,3,5]. There were 2 correct, 2 incorrect and 2 pseudo-errors (e.g. starting to count from the middle) in puppet’s counting, in each set size. Children of age 4 were examined with set size of 6,8,12 and 20. Whereas, 3 years old were tested within the set size of 6 and 12. Gelman and Meck (1983) reasoned that younger children have less attention span and would probably experience its deficit with more given trails. Results of their study showed that children found around 100%
She proposed that infants do have an innate number concept by presenting their ability to add and subtract small numbers. To test it, the looking-time approach was chosen which has been a basic type of method used in research with infants. In the first experiment, there were two conditions: addition and subtraction. In the addition task, the doll was placed in the platform in front of infant. The screen was put up and covered the doll. Then the hand appeared and placed the second doll on the stage leaving emptyhanded. When the screen dropped, there was either 1 doll which was an impossible outcome, or 2 dolls which was a possible outcome. In the subtraction condition, there were two dolls on the platform. The screen went up and covered the dolls. Then, the hand appeared and took one of the dolls away. Therefore, when the screen went down, there was either one doll as a possible outcome or 2 dolls as an impossible outcome. The conditions were presented to the infants 6 times with either 1 or 2 dolls outcome. In both cases infants looked longer when the impossible outcome was shown. The second experiment replicated the first one and came with the same results. This indicated that babies understand the concept of number as well as addition and subtraction of small numbers. They looked for longer at an unexpected outcome. However, it could be criticised and argued that rather than implicit knowledge of