Long before being able to count out loud, babies may already have a good understanding of what the concept of counting means.
That's what researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, discovered in a study published Thursday in the journal .
The study tried to answer one big question: Are kids really unaware what counting means until they鈥檙e in preschool?
Scientists who specialize in building numerical ability in kids worked with 14 and 18-month-old babies for the research.
In some cases, they showed the baby boys and girls little toy cars and dogs and counted each one aloud as the items were placed into a box.
In other instances, scientists simply pointed to each toy before hiding it.
, a cognitive scientist working on the study, said she was surprised by the results.
"Babies were better able to remember the number of toys we had hidden when we had counted them."
Without counting, the babies had a hard time remembering how many items were in the box, or they got easily distracted after the first toy was pulled out.
When the toys were counted, Feigenson said it was clear the children expected more than one item to be pulled from the box.
The study suggests that very young infants can have a sense of what counting is and can understand that it's linked to quantity or number in the world.
Feigenson said most kids don't get the full meaning of number words until they're about four years old, which she thinks is surprising given how much counting young children are exposed to.
鈥淩esearch like ours shows that babies actually have a pretty sophisticated understanding of the world. They鈥檙e already trying to make sense of what adults around them are saying, and that includes this domain of counting and numbers,鈥� she added.
The research team is also conducting follow-up studies to see if English-speaking babies react to counting in a foreign language, and if early counting practice leads to later number skills.
