Do preschool children recognize auditory-visual numerical correspondences?

The present study investigated the ability of 3- and 4-year-old children to perform tasks which require matching sets of sounds to numerically equivalent visual displays. We found that 3-year-olds performed at chance on the auditory-visual matching task, while 4-year-olds performed significantly above chance. There is evidence that mastery of the linguistic counting system is related to success on this task. These findings are unexpected given previous research reporting that 6-8-month-olds can detect the numerical equivalence between a set of sounds and items in a visual display.