By around the age of 5½, many children in the US judge that numbers never end, and that it is always possible to add +1 to a set. These same children also generally perform well when asked to label the quantity of a set after 1 object is added (e.g., judging that a set labeled “five” should now be “six”). These findings suggest that children have implicit knowledge of the “successor function”: every natural number, n, has a successor, n+1. Here, we explored how children discover this recursive function, and whether it might be related to discovering productive morphological rules that govern language-specific counting routines (e.g., the rules in English that represent base 10 structure). We tested 4- and 5-year-old children’s knowledge of counting with three tasks, which we then related to (1) children’s belief that 1 can always be added to any number (the successor function), and (2) their belief that numbers never end (infinity). Children who exhibited knowledge of a productive counting rule were significantly more likely to believe that numbers are infinite (i.e., there is no largest number), though such counting knowledge wasn’t directly linked to knowledge of the successor function, per se. Also, our findings suggest that children as young as four years of age are able to implement rules defined over their verbal count list to generate number words beyond their spontaneous counting range, an insight which may support reasoning over their acquired verbal count sequence to infer that numbers never end.
The carry propagation of the successor function
