Starting on the assumption that the cardinal principle (CP) only states that the last word of a correct count denotes the numerosity of the counted set, this study sets out to test whether or not the acquisition of the CP involves the discovery of the later-greater principle by testing knowledge of verbal numerical comparisons in children who had recently learned the CP. The findings suggest that these children can only compare number words between ‘six’ and ‘ten’ when mapping number words on non-verbal representations of numerosity, thus suggesting that the acquisition of the CP does not involve discovering the correspondence between the order of the number words and the relative size of the denoted numerosities.