Young Children’s Understanding of ‘More ’ Page 1 of 39 Young Children’s Understanding of ‘More ’ and Discrimination of Number and Surface Area

The psychology supporting the use of quantifier words (e.g., ‘some’, ‘most’, ‘more’) is of interest to both scientists studying quantity representation (e.g., number, area) and to scientists and linguists studying the syntax and semantics of these terms. Understanding quantifiers requires both a mastery of the linguistic representations and a connection with cognitive representations of quantity. Some words (e.g., ‘many’, ‘much’) refer to only a single dimension, while others, like ‘more ’ refer to comparison by numeric (‘more dots’) or non-numeric dimensions (‘more goo’). In the present work, we ask two questions. First, when do children begin to understand the word ‘more ’ as used to compare non-numeric substances and collections of discrete objects? Second, what is the underlying psychophysical character of the cognitive representations children utilize to verify such sentences? We find that children can understand and verify sentences including ‘more goo ’ and ‘more dots ’ at around 3.3 – younger than some previous studies have suggested – and that children employ the Approximate Number System and an Approximate Area System in verification. These systems share a common underlying format (i.e., Gaussian representations with scalar variability). The similarity in the age of onse