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How do children learn to connect expressions (e.g “that red apple”) to the real-world objects they refer to? The dominant view in developmental psychology is that children rely primarily on descriptive information encoded in content words (red, apple). In contrast, linguistic semantic theories of adult language attribute primacy to the grammar (e.g. words like that, another), which first establish the status of potential referents within the discourse context (old, new) before descriptive information can factor in. These theories predict that reference can succeed even when the description does not match the referent. We explore this novel prediction in adults and children. Over three experiments, we found that (i) adults relied on the articles to establish the referent, even when the noun description did not fit, consistent with grammar-first accounts; (ii) consistent with description-first accounts, and contrary to adult behavior, 3-5yo children prioritized the descriptions provided by the nouns, despite being sensitive to grammatical information. 

Humans are unique in their capacity to both represent number exactly and to express these representations symbolically. This correlation has prompted debate regarding whether symbolic number systems are necessary to represent large exact number. Previous work addressing this question in innumerate adults and semi-numerate children has been limited by conflicting results and differing methodologies, and has not yielded a clear answer. We address this debate by adapting methods used with innumerate populations (a “set-matching” task) for 3- to 5-year-old US children at varying stages of symbolic number acquisition. In five studies we find that children’s ability to match sets exactly is related not simply to knowing the meanings of a few number words, but also to understanding how counting is used to generate sets (i.e., the cardinal principle). However, while children were more likely to match sets after acquiring the cardinal principle, they nevertheless demonstrated failures, compatible with the hypothesis that the ability to reason about exact equality emerges sometime later. These findings provide important data on the origin of exact number concepts, and point to knowledge of a counting system, rather than number language in general, as a key ingredient in the ability to reason about large exact number.