Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ont, Canada.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2010 Jan-Feb;105(1-2):138-45. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2009.08.004. Epub 2009 Sep 29.
Most children who are older than 6 years of age apply essential counting principles when they enumerate a set of objects. Essential principles include (a) one-to-one correspondence between items and count words, (b) stable order of the count words, and (c) cardinality-that the last number refers to numerosity. We found that the acquisition of a fourth principle, that the order in which items are counted is irrelevant, follows a different trajectory. The majority of 5- to 11-year-olds indicated that the order in which objects were counted was relevant, favoring a left-to-right, top-to-bottom order of counting. Only some 10- and 11-year-olds applied the principle of order irrelevance, and this knowledge was unrelated to their numeration skill. We conclude that the order irrelevance principle might not play an important role in the development of children's conceptual knowledge of counting.
大多数 6 岁以上的儿童在数一组物体时会运用基本的计数原则。基本原理包括：(a) 项目与计数词之间的一一对应；(b) 计数词的稳定顺序；(c) 基数性——最后一个数字表示数量。我们发现，第四个原则的习得，即计数的顺序无关紧要，遵循着不同的轨迹。大多数 5 到 11 岁的儿童表示，计数的顺序是相关的，他们倾向于从左到右、从上到下的计数顺序。只有一些 10 岁和 11 岁的儿童应用了顺序无关的原则，而这种知识与他们的计数技能无关。我们的结论是，顺序无关原则在儿童对计数的概念性理解的发展中可能没有起到重要作用。
