Much research has examined the reciprocal relations between a child's spontaneous focus on number (SFON) in the preschool years and later mathematical achievement. However, this literature relies on several different tasks to assess SFON with distinct task demands, making it unclear to what extent these tasks measure the same underlying construct. Moreover, prior studies have investigated SFON in the context of small sets exclusively, but no work has explored whether children demonstrate SFON for large sets and how this relates to children's math ability. In the current study, preschoolers were presented four distinct SFON tasks assessing their spontaneous attention to number for small (Experiment 1) and large (Experiment 2) sets of numbers. Results revealed performance across the four distinct SFON tasks was unrelated. Moreover, preschooler's SFON for small sets (1-4 items) was significantly stronger than that for large sets (10-40 items), and analyses revealed that number knowledge was only associated with SFON for small sets and not large. Together, findings suggest that SFON may not be a set-size-independent construct and instead may hinge upon a child's number knowledge, at least in the preschool years. The role of number language and how it relates to children's SFON are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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学龄前儿童的数字知识与自发地专注于小而不是大集合的数字有关。

许多研究已经研究了学龄前儿童自发关注数字 (SFON) 与后来的数学成就之间的相互关系。然而，该文献依赖于几个不同的任务来评估具有不同任务需求的 SFON，因此不清楚这些任务在多大程度上衡量了相同的基础结构。此外，先前的研究仅在小集合的背景下研究了 SFON，但没有研究探索儿童是否在大集合中展示 SFON 以及这与儿童的数学能力有何关系。在当前的研究中，学龄前儿童接受了四个不同的 SFON 任务，评估他们对小（实验 1）和大（实验 2）组数字的自发注意力。结果显示，四个不同的 SFON 任务的性能无关。而且，学龄前儿童对小集合（1-4 项）的 SFON 显着强于对大集合（10-40 项）的 SFON，分析表明，数字知识仅与小集合的 SFON 相关，而与大集合无关。总之，研究结果表明 SFON 可能不是一个独立于集合大小的结构，而是可能取决于孩子的数字知识，至少在学龄前是这样。讨论了数字语言的作用及其与儿童 SFON 的关系。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2020 APA，保留所有权利）。研究结果表明，SFON 可能不是一个独立于集合大小的结构，而是可能取决于孩子的数字知识，至少在学龄前是这样。讨论了数字语言的作用及其与儿童 SFON 的关系。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2020 APA，保留所有权利）。研究结果表明，SFON 可能不是一个独立于集合大小的结构，而是可能取决于孩子的数字知识，至少在学龄前是这样。讨论了数字语言的作用及其与儿童 SFON 的关系。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2020 APA，保留所有权利）。