Editing Counting (section)

==Education and development==
{{Main|Pre-math skills}}
Learning to count is an important educational/developmental milestone in most cultures of the world. Learning to count is a child's very first step into mathematics, and constitutes the most fundamental idea of that discipline. However, some cultures in Amazonia and the Australian Outback do not count,<ref>[[Brian Butterworth|Butterworth, B.]], Reeve, R., Reynolds, F., & Lloyd, D. (2008). Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(35), 13179–13184.</ref><ref>Gordon, P. (2004). Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science, 306, 496–499.</ref> and their languages do not have number words.

Many children at just 2 years of age have some skill in reciting the count list (that is, saying "one, two, three,&nbsp;..."). They can also answer questions of ordinality for small numbers, for example, "What comes after ''three''?". They can even be skilled at pointing to each object in a set and reciting the words one after another. This leads many parents and educators to the conclusion that the child knows how to use counting to determine the size of a set.<ref>Fuson, K.C. (1988). Children's counting and concepts of number. New York: Springer–Verlag.</ref> Research suggests that it takes about a year after learning these skills for a child to understand what they mean and why the procedures are performed.<ref>Le Corre, M., & Carey, S. (2007). One, two, three, four, nothing more: An investigation of the conceptual sources of the verbal counting principles. Cognition, 105, 395–438.</ref><ref>Le Corre, M., Van de Walle, G., Brannon, E. M., Carey, S. (2006). Re-visiting the competence/performance debate in the acquisition of the counting principles. Cognitive Psychology, 52(2), 130–169.</ref> In the meantime, children learn how to name cardinalities that they can [[subitize]].