DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

It°s the Overall Amount, Silly

Quantitative Development in Infancy and Early Childhood
By Kelly S. Mix, Janellen Huttenlocher, and Susan Cohen Levine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 168 pp. Cloth, $35.

Quantitative Development in Infancy and Early Childhood is a detailed introduction to recent debates on the nature of quantitative skills in children. Readers famil-iar with issues of innate and acquired skills in other domains of development will sense a familiarity in topics argued in this book. There are the nativists, whom the reader will come to know emblematically as Wynn, Gallistel, Gellman, Meek, and Markman, and there are the developmentalists, mainly the authors of the book, along with Clearfield, Gao, Jeong, Jordan, and Waxman. The "what°s already there" and the "what develops" positions are argued in terms of experimental data and the degree to which these data supports theoretical positions. The developmentalists make a compelling case. There is a common-sense feel to the book, where the authors support their positions with experimental results but do not try to make the data do more work than they can do. They are up front about where there is ambiguity and where more research is needed.